This poem recalls my childhood on a farm in southeastern Minnesota. My body holds the still-fresh memories of thistle fields, milking machines, iodide dip, pipelines and the milk cooler. Even more vividly, the incident described here returns me to the sudden shock and lingering grief in our family after my brother’s suicide. I can’t tell whether the ending evokes death’s multitude, or points to life beyond death. It’s both for me, so this is a poem for the barren, incomplete hours of Good Friday, when the Christian tradition grieves death’s power, Christ’s burial, and not yet the resurrection.

thistles take the hillside
a purple glory of furred spears
a fierce army of spiky weeds
we climb through them
your mother, two of her daughters, and me
a late walk in the long June light

in the barn the heart throb
of the milking machine continues
as your father and brother change
the iodide-dipped tubes
from one udder to the next
and the milk courses through the pipeline
to the cooling vat where it swirls
like a lost sea in a silver box

we are climbing to the grove of white birch trees
whose papery bark will shed
the heart-ringed initials of your sister
as the grief wears down

this farm bears milk and hay
and this mother woman walking beside us
has borne nine children

and one magic one is dead:
riding her bike
she was a glare of light
on the windshield of the car
that killed her

a year and a half has passed
and death is folded in among the dishtowels
hangs in the hall closet by the family photos
and like a ring of fine mist
above the dinner table

we stand on a hill looking at birch bark
poking among hundred-year-old graves
that have fallen into the grass
rubbing the moss off and feeling for the names
that the stone sheds
we are absorbing death like nitrates
fertilizing our growth

this can happen:
a glare of light
an empty place
wordlessly we finger her absence
already there are four grandchildren
the family grows thick as thistle

Andrea Musher