In the hour before sunset, the wind
	winds down, the lake’s surface stills
		to glass, the sky’s blue mirror

broken by slow-moving clouds. Below,
	the cabinet of the unseen: green plants
		tangle in currents, flashes of rainbow 

trout glimmer in cold spots, the silty bottom stirs
	with the slightest touch. Memory fills
		the water, obscures the deep

sleep of my father. His last two weeks 
	when I watched his breath arrive
		as rasps that raised

the plaid wool blanket I gave him,
	his heart still too strong to arrest
		after ninety years of living too well.

Beneath the covers cooled the blood
	of a man I called my father, though 
		everyone has an understory

we can never know. Eventually, the ripples stop,
	the sheets still. We are left
		on the dock, straining

to see clearly what swims
	swiftly away from us...
                        

Tucked between pastures on Nana’s farm,
riddled with ravines, tangled trees, crisscrossed
creeks: a wild place. We hiked open fields to enter 
the woods—in full leaf, sunlight changed
to dusk when we passed over the threshold. 
We called it Ireland, as generations had before,
named for the hungry, rocky place left behind. 

How long before their clearing and plowing
brought them to the edge of this green place? 
Was there something in the cut of the hill, 
or the way the breeze lifted their hair, licked 
the leaves, or was it the smell of sweet grass
that gave them glimpses of an older place 
across the sea?

We inherited the longing for home
without being told—the way Ireland
was whispered with cloudy blue 
far-away eyes, shoulders shrugged,
at times a passing sigh. Inside
the trees we claimed our tributaries
from fairies, climbed mossy rocks,
believed we were transported afar.

Back in school one Monday, a nun asked 
our younger brother to write what he had done 
over the weekend. We went to Ireland, 
he inked. We just got back.