Dying’s the best
Of all the arts men learn in a dead place.
                                                  —James Wright

Sometimes, on evenings like this, my mother will speak of Tom Scott,
going down to a place inside her beyond the river’s high reach,
to a place where grief has no pallbearer except the river;
and I know she is thinking of that threadbare year of Depression, the year
my mother was released from the egregious care of the mother
superior, smiling for a portrait of the student body

in a coat purchased with the sale of a calf’s stiffened body.
Or was it the color of her hair that pulled Tom Scott
toward her, the fox-collared coat being my grandmother’s
idea of what a perfect lady of fashion should wear, past reach
of a farm girl’s dreams—or anyone’s—that year
in Kentucky? As she walked on the banks of the Ohio, I think the river