Charlene,

one night, leaving your son’s makeshift bedroom in the loft

of the barn, in that first house I knew you in,

crunching through January’s snow back into your kitchen,

past dinner’s left-out dessert plates, then past the fireplace whose embers

still chittered like the chatting old sisters on the bus

I had taken here the day before, north, for eleven and a half hours—

a trip during which I sometimes crocheted what became

a rather long scarf for your son—then up the stairs past your bedroom,

to the guest room, up to the gables with its sloped ceiling

where waited the bed’s patchwork quilts, a painted comb, the lamp

you left on for me, and for some reason lost to time

a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl near enough—

maybe on a low bookshelf outside the room?—near enough

for me to choose it, and once under the covers I was awake

from start to finish with Dear Kitty, again, with the Epilogue, again,

though I felt I was reading it for the first time, or more like

I was a tree to which a bird returns and this time sees

the branch on which it will make its nest, and so I understood—

because being told of your death I want to parse all I have learned from you—

I understood we were to have some experiences many times in our lives

if we were lucky, but we would live them each time differently,

which seems obvious now, but then I was sixteen and didn’t know,

I didn’t know that each experience wasn’t just the first of identical ones to

    come,

like a rack of same dresses, and for that reason I thought

the mother of men I loved would all be like you, and all their sons

as kind as he, and that the journey between barn and house on a winter

    night

would always show a spray of constellations that would connect

all I was feeling with the goodness of the earth, also turning.