SETTLE

We were in a place we rarely go anymore, the door-key in my mother's purse, as if her childhood house had options, wasn't its own

dead end. The cocklebur- and ragweed-choked yard. The windows busted through, someone had dragged the couch into the driveway, a few plates brimmed

with rainwater. It was never much to begin with. A shotgun house on cinder blocks, plumbing never installed. The roof's tin lid,

wind-hooked, bent. I've always wondered what befell those homesteads along highways. Slackened—

the crib barn's withered oak. How a family recedes from the decline. Now I know it can happen swift. The Mississippi River's ferry

service suspended. The lumber mill leaving workers waiting in line. No one makes a living farming these days. No one takes over

the uptown shops—all the undressed window displays.

Staggering—

we're in a field I used to love and hate. The thumb-fat bees at the water pump. Dog packs switching through goldenrod. The hills stitched

in soy and cotton. The crying panther I'd fear to hear before knowing it was a tale. No one in the family could believe

my grandmother's last request: to be buried between her two late husbands. It had been thirty years since their bones rose on floods and washed away.

Who would remind her it would have to be otherwise? It just made sense to let it go.