It is eighty years I listen to fortune teller
Say that reunions with lost ones
                                                                   approach.

I think of other women,
how some are beautiful, and do not know it;
how most are not, and know;

I’ve gone up-rivers to get rid of them
where I dispatch fish. The family
will say this is a lie

she found no reason for it setting there, the poems
not improved by poet’s name?

Through the night Grace lives by fire.
She sings to it, she reads it poetry,
she knits and rocks and nods and…

All my life I had hoped someday to own
at least myself, only to find I am
Flood’s ligaments, the aureole of Mamma,

My uncle who got around told me they plastered
money on the pictures, and threw coins
at all the saints.

Is it here their ocean-purple eyes
gaze at the world up as down

If blue isn’t here
it’s there