That’s right—you’re getting better. At least not any

(tank            stuck in mud            ambulance)

worse.                           Shall we write a

letter for you?                     Don’t be

frightened. You’ll go home soon.

Invisible Thicket / Muriel

Invisible Thicket

Muriel

Our home is your home—the Normans’ house

and ours have always felt like two rooms

in one grand mansion. Now an invisible

thicket of grief surrounds their house—

I can barely make myself walk through it.

In the kitchen, the barn, the fields, Frank’s absence

hovers over everything—he isn’t climbing up the windmill

to see who might be coming down the road; he isn’t

teasing his mother, pretending to cut into the cake

she’s made for the church supper; he isn’t brushing

burs out of the horses’ manes and tails; he isn’t

spreading hot raspberry jam on the first slice

of bread, warm from the oven; he isn’t singing;

he isn’t smiling; he isn’t whistling while he mends

the broken fence where the rooster escaped last night;

he won’t be hitching up his team to drive us all

to the dance next Friday night (he won’t ask me to dance—

the smell of shaving soap, the thoughts we hid so well

from one another, forever hidden now). The place

we’ve tried to hold for Frank to fit back in

when he returns refuses to close over

or fill in. It gapes and glares around us everywhere:

Here I’m not, says Frank, and here, and here.

Gray / Emma

Gray

Emma

It’s almost October. Shouldn’t

the maple leaves be changing color?

Those four sunflowers must be yellow,

but all the flowers’ faces look dirty gray

to me. The purple asters are so brave, trying

to offer us a bit of color while they can, before

they’re killed off by the frost. The red rooster’s

cock-a-doodle-doo barely wakes me up. It used to

have me jumping out of bed, onto the cool floor,

and getting quickly dressed so I could go flying

downstairs to breakfast. At five a.m. today,

awake already, I clutch my damp pillow,

debating: Should I go to school or

not? Can I still be a student?

A Rock So Heavy / Muriel

A Rock So Heavy

Muriel

Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling …

Emma is singing, in the middle of the night,

a song we used to sing with Frank and Ollie.

I get up, put on a sweater, and follow

the sweet, sad song through the darkness

to where she is sitting on a tree stump on their side

of the creek, her voice as clear as the rippling water.

I sit down beside her. I couldn’t sleep, she tells me.

I never can, these days. (I know. I was not asleep myself.)

Nothing, she says, will ever be the same again.

I want to comfort her, but everything I think to say