Post Halloween: What the Living Do

Each time my father and I talk on the telephone, he shares a new discovery he's made about my recently-deceased grandmother. I sometimes imagine him in his study, bent over her things. The dog is asleep on the small sofa. He's got that same old picture of himself on his desk: the one of him in his orange hunting jacket, holding back the buck's face by clutching its ten-point rack.

This time we talk, my father says he's come across a large envelope that my grandmother had set aside for me. He tells me her handwriting spells out my name across the front: Sarah Pooh. He opens the envelope for the first time as we're on the phone, and immediately starts laughing. "What?" I ask, "what's in it?" He says, "Some stupid shit you made in '81" -- but in a sweet way, if you can imagine that -- in a way that casts me as a 9-year-old girl again, that same year I'd collected locusts' exoskeletons they'd molted overnight. I'd lined up twenty or more carcasses on my bedroom dresser. I loved them for their perfect shells, how I couldn't find where they'd exited their own exterior.

My father tells me there are letters I'd written to my grandmother in the envelope, too. And then, he says there's some kinda diary in the envelope. Written on the front of it is a note from my grandmother: "This should go back to Pooh, it was a gift she gave to me." I'd given her the diary in the early '90s. "To write about your life," I told her then.

"Holy shit," my father says, "it's completely full." He reads me a snippet from inside: "Went to Des Moines this weekend. We ate at the country club which is so elegant. I don't feel very comfortable there." This is not necessarily news to my dad, or to me. But still, it's not something she would have verbalized while alive; it wouldn't have been right for her to say she didn't feel right. I can see my grandmother now, holding the heavy sterling silver fork, poking at a spinach leaf.

This evening, as I was waiting for the subway, I read the first poem in Marie Howe's collection What the Living Do. It is a collection about her dead brother. "The Boy" starts: My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban / summer night: / white T-shirt, blue jeans -- to the field at the end of the street.

I talk too much. Phrases like: back then once one time when I was a kid that same year I collected the locusts' exoskeletons. I have a tendency to make stories of life. Some see the world by design line shape unity depth point of relief and there are others, like me, who set those who have passed back into motion. We place the dead upon a trajectory that keeps going: Marie Howe's brother, my father at his desk, his tiny mother shrunken by a swivel chair at The Club, you reading this in your now, me writing this in my now.

The subway comes. When it does, its wind kicks up my fine hair. I push back my eyeglasses either out of habit or need, it would be impossible for me to tell you which. Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit / overgrown / with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there, I board the train. Stand clear of the closing doors please. It is too hard for me not to look into life, to not see into poems. I don't do well at scary movies because, like poems and stories, I tend to believe. It is how I put flesh back onto bones.

My father and I are not so different from each other. After all, he holds back the buck's face and makes us look at it. In the darkness of early morning, he slurps his weak coffee while unsealing the glue of envelopes, braving discoveries. Now that his mother is gone, she is less his mother and more a woman who was once a mother. Her gnarled seamstress hands are here with us, cast in a new light. She is tearing open a popover that should or should not be handled with hands.