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taught it to me.
    I just made it up,
I say.
    No you didn’t,
she says back
. It’s too good. Someone
    taught that to you.
    I don’t say anything back. Just look out the window
    and smile.
    Too good,
I am thinking. The stuff I make up is
too good.

dannemora
    At the gate of the prison, guards glare at us, then slowly
    allow us in.
    My big brother is afraid.
    He looks up at the barbed wire
    puts his hands in his pockets.
    I know he wishes he was home with his chemistry set.
    I know he wants to be anywhere but here.
    Nothing but stone and a big building that goes so far up
    and so far back and forth that we can’t see
    where the beginning is
    or where it might end. Gray brick, small windows
    covered with wire. Who could see
    out from here? The guards check our pockets,
    check our bags, make us
    walk through X-ray machines.
    My big brother holds out his arms. Lets the guards pat him
    from shoulder to ankle, checking
    for anything he might be hiding . . .
    He is Hope Austin Woodson the Second, part of a long line
    of Woodsons—doctors and lawyers and teachers—
    but as quickly as THAT! he can become
    a number. Like Robert Leon Irby is now
    so many numbers across the pocket
    of his prison uniform that it’s hard
    not to keep looking at them,
    waiting for them to morph into letters
    that spell out
    my uncle’s name.

not robert
    When the guard brings our uncle to the waiting room
    that is filled with other families
    waiting, he is not
    Robert. His afro is gone now,
    shaved to a black shadow on his perfect skull.
    His eyebrows are thicker than I remember, dipping down
    in a newer, sadder way. Even when he smiles,
    opens his arms
    to hug all of us at once, the bit I catch of it, before
    jumping into his hug, is a half smile, caught
    and trapped inside a newer, sadder
    uncle.

mountain song
    On the way home from visiting Robert,
    I watch the mountains move past me
    and slowly the mountain song starts coming again
    more words this time, coming faster
    than I can sing them.
    Passing the mountains
    Passing the sea
    Passing the heavens
    waiting for me.
    Look at the mountains
    Such a beautiful sea
    And there’s a promise that heaven
    is filled with glory.
    I sing the song over and over again,
    quietly into the windowpane, my forehead
    pressed against the cool glass. Tears coming fast now.
    The song makes me think of Robert and Daddy
and Greenville
    and everything that feels far behind me now, everything
    that is going
    or already gone.
    I am thinking if I can hold on to the memory of this song
    get home and write it down, then it will happen,
    I’ll be a writer. I’ll be able to hold on to
    each moment, each memory
    everything.

poem on paper
    When anyone in the family asks
    what I’m writing, I usually say,
    Nothing
    or
    A story
    or
    A poem
    and only my mother says,
    Just so long as you’re not writing about our family.
    And I’m not.
    Well, not really . . .
    Up in the mountains
    far from the sea
    there’s a place called Dannemora
    the men are not free . . .

daddy
    It is early spring
    when my grandmother sends for us.
    Warm enough to believe again
    that food will come from the newly thawed earth.
    This is the weather,
my mother says,
Daddy loved
    to garden in.
We arrive
    not long before my grandfather is about to take
    his last breaths,
    breathless ourselves from our first ride
    in an airplane.
    I want to tell him all about it
    how loud it was when the plane lifted into the sky,
    each of us, leaning toward the window,
    watching New York
    grow small and speckled beneath us.
    How the meals arrived
    on tiny trays—some kind of fish that none of us ate.
    I want to tell him how the stewardess gave us wings
    to pin to our blouses and shirts and told Mama
    we were beautiful and well behaved. But
    my grandfather is sleeping when we come to his bedside,
    opens his eyes only to smile, turns so that my grandmother
    can press ice cubes against his lips. She tells us,
    He needs his rest now.
That evening
    he dies.
    On the day