“Do you know what it means
when someone’s dead?”
When I asked you that,
you were sitting on my lap
with your head nestled
against my left shoulder;
your brother stood next to my rocking chair
with my right arm round his waist.
You both had been so happy
when I met you at the bus, and came running,
too young to wonder why
I was there at that time.
When I asked the question,
you both got very quiet.
“Well, you’re gone away,” your brother said,
and you added,
“And you never ever come back.”
So you understood
as much as I.

“I have to tell you Daddy’s dead.”
You went limp—“Daddy’s dead?”—
and turned your face into my chest.
I could feel
tears burn through my shirt—quiet tears,
you made no sound.
Your brother’s body stiffened
in my right arm.
“Grandpa, how did he get dead?”
An obscene thing swung in the air before me.
“He put a rope around his neck until he died.”
That young, flat voice again:
“Why did he do that?”
The obscene thing disappeared.
“I don’t know, babe.
Nobody knows for sure.”
He stood there,
still and never cried.

Other things happened too:
A funeral in that small Midwestern town;
your mother going numb
with me telling her,
“Now stand up."
“Walk.”
“Sit down.”
And something was buried in a muddy hole.
But what I remember
is your brother going stiff,
and your tears burning me
where my left shoulder meets my throat.