Through a thrum tunnel crackled the last of her voice,
no, your parents aren�t here, she�d said
though my mother would be there � soon enough �
to find my grandmother�s body laid out on the kitchen floor
in a house I�d never seen. Everyone was too busy
with the funeral to meet my bus, so I�ve never
had to imagine her under black dirt, rare dark sickles
of it under my fingernails now. The shadow under my pine
welcomes irises and bleeding hearts from the farmer�s market,
rescued zinnias and azaleas from botched plantings

elsewhere in the yard. I�ve my half barrels
and hanging petunias, just enough flowers
so I can ignore the overlong lawn � a different thing
altogether than Nana�s functional garden: corn, cukes,
squash, peas to feed the family. Winters she�d shoot her deer
or let one of the boys tag it on her license. So much of her
seemed about existence, but I remember a chicken wire trellis
she�d put up for glorious blue morning glories,
her whoop as she slid down the hill on a square of cardboard,
bubble pipes and basins of dishsoap suds, the little squirrel
she fed peanuts on the back stoop.

Today was hot, not unbearable but a harbinger
of days when my throat will close around wet-dishrag air
like the heavy heat of afternoons spent in the room
above my grandmother�s garage exploring all
I�d ever know of her early life � button hooks, letters
and lace in her mother�s trunk, boxes of faded photos
where she was breezy, laughing, her arms around friends
known only to the person on the other side
of the Brownie. I talk to her more these days than then
my throat closing around questions

of who I am within the woman. Who were you beyond
mother and wife? She�d once shown me a long-haired sporran,
the last of her uniform in a bagpipe band; she was its heartbeat,
the bass drummer. Was that when you were a young girl,
or after the first husband you kept a secret until your death?
Why didn�t you tell us about him, did he die, did he beat you,
did he discover an infidelity? Nana drank a glass of chocolate milk
every night before bed because she was too skinny,
she told me, leaving unspoken the reasons
for shots of Wild Turkey snuck in the pantry.

Angina, her heart, I wasn�t surprised by the cause
but the timing, my chance phone call the night before.
How�d she sound, had she been drinking? my parents asked
because I�d been the last to talk to her. To me she�d sounded
like Nana, her voice roughened by whiskey from a lifetime
or that evening, I couldn�t see how it mattered
but I answered, no, because that�s what they needed
to hear.

She taught me to crochet a doiley, that over-shuffling
ruins a cribbage hand, that you find a way to go on.
I take my place as a speck of sand rolled by surf,
as a dot on the third planet of a yellow star on a spiral arm,
as a lover of poets. I allow this in myself,
this space, her silence.