It isn't exactly that she doesn't want to talk about it now. She just doesn't know

how to talk about it. She's not sure there are any words to talk about it

in. She taught her firstborn first words in a dead language from

a foreign country where they do things differently.

Without words for how it felt or how she feels, the way the world is not quite real

inside when her boys just brush against her coming home to a hole in the ground

with their fathers' footsteps and tongues wagging words

like put the game on and gimme a beer or something stronger

and gotta see to that carburetor and love it when you get bossy

Without the way his cupping palm fit there his hand at rest on hers

and listening to her own heart beat in time with his breath, asleep.

Without her babies, asleep or unquiet, crying

out for her to leave the bed and her own surety

of being held to offer up the same.

Babies impossibly alive, blood singing electric, every single minute,

without road shadow, ripped denim, ragged spirits and

the cursed long night of war where John went and came back and went again

and where she went and came back and went again.

She wanted to stay in bed that deciding night

but she had only three things that defined her, three princes warring for her attention

and in war sacrifices must be made.

Tonight John wrote to her from that foreign country: I know Mary would say it's

not the house gone that matters. That's just a house, and home is where we are,

what we make. I know she's right, it's just, I look around and there's

just no destination where the absence won't be I'm always walking

over my own grave

She concurs: that's what they're good at, isn't it? The one common tongue they all speak

is the dead one and the one the ghost steals from the living.

o

A/N: The reference to the past being a foreign country originated with The Go Between by L.P Hartley.