Faux-leather bound and thick as an onion, it flakes —
an heirloom from Iowa my dead often read.
I open the black flap to speak the spakes
and quickly lose track of who wed, who bred.
She taped our family register as it tore,
her hand stuttering like a sewing machine,
darning the blanks with farmers gone before —
Inez, Alvah, Delbert, Ermadean.
Our undistinguished line she pressed in the heft
between the testaments, with spaces to spare,
and one stillborn’s name, smudged; her fingers left
a mounting watchfulness, a quiet repair —
when I saw the AIDS quilt, spread out in acres,
it was stitched with similar scripts by similar makers.
~ from The Road to Emmaus (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014)
