Bruce offers to care for Marie’s dog when she returns
to the farm where the earth makes room for her father.
In the old house, she packs his arrowhead collection,
his favorite blue coat, and her mother’s sewing machine.
It must have rained sometimes, but all she remembers
are blue skies over the fields where she and Papa walked.
When she gets back home, she winds thread
around the bobbin the way her mother twirled
her hair before pinning down the spiral.
She patches her father’s coat with yellow and red threads.
Adding money he left in his will to her savings,
Marie buys a house near work and Bruce’s home.
She fills it with a leopard-skin-print sofa,
a carpet patterned with green waves, her collections
of carved ducks, beautiful masks, rocks, and globes.
She’s close enough to the Hudson River
to hear small waves lap the riverbank in summer,
see ice glisten in winter.