Depending on the Wind

I A score of years ago I felled a hundred pines to build a house. Two stories, seven rooms in all. I built my love a home. Our daughter was in orbit in the womb. Mountains spun off like the arm of a galaxy into the emptiness our windows framed. "What a view!" our friends exclaimed, and "Sunsets to die for every single night!" 2 Vertigo of solitude, distillate of loneliness for blood, my wife untrue, my daughter flown, I, like a widower or worse, move among the rooms I made. Where once I was not alone, now each closed door is panic, and spaces grow immense with memory, like shadows at dusk. Gone that arrangement of allegiances called family we never really know before it ends. Like love itself, it isn't true till then. I have no family now but remembrences of tiny joys, tinier dramas we used to call our life, like pollen over everything: brightly colored clothespins on the line, a cross-shaped coral earring whose match is lost, books of fairy tales we read aloud at night. I must be dumb as a gunnysack of hammers. Wind still blows through open windows like it always used to do. What did I love that made me believe it would last?