We found it at the bottom of her stocking drawer,
the cover, a dark and brooding red,
most if its blue-lined pages blank.

“Christ,” said my father, “lemme see that thing.
                                      She was taking notes?”

No one thought her the journal type.
Except for shopping lists, I never saw her write.
Talk was all utility. “The wash is on the stair.”

You had to study the silence for clues.
(As sometimes still it strikes me strange,
vaguely pornographic, when words are used
to feel or tease a meaning out of things.)
(And when in books I first saw lines
like, Margaret, are you grieving…?, it felt
like I was breaking, deeper, even,
than Chomskian law, mother-tongue taboo.
Goes to show—quoting her—the lives we don’t know.)

                                  Toledo, July 17, 1933
Up early and on our way…arrived Chicago 2:00 P.M.
swimming with Kate and Riley…who, I wonder,
are Kate and Riley?—dinner tomorrow with Roy…Roy!
I know Roy, Roy is the brother I never knew.
Tell about Roy, I’d cry. “Roy married Hazel
and worked for Schwinn.”

                                      Left Chicago 8:30 A.M.
bumper fell off, put it back on  lunch in Ames Iowa
1 P.M.  crossed toll bridge at Council Bluffs
arrived Omaha 6 P.M. {years before Kerouac}
left Omaha 7 A.M. {It’s On the Road, with Ma.}
              breakfast at Fremont, Nebraska 8:45 A.M.

And so it goes, the little that we get not much.
But always what time. What time not much occurred.

But isn’t not much typically all we ever get to go on?
No one, for instance, said anything much
driving her to the Home. And not in the journal
but marked in her Bible (I found this later after she died):
The Lord hath put us to silence and given us water of gall to drink.

Right. Sure. But:
                                     lunch
                                                         Kearney, Nebraska, 1 P.M.

The only point of talk, she said, is learning to be brave enough. 
Quite a stretch of gravel road outside of Shelton.
And: Just beyond Salt Lake City brakes began to smoke.

The day we checked her into the Home,
free that night I started these notes.
These notes on notes. Tonight’s the ten-year yahrzeit     
and I’m still not done. An early draft said,
Graft a compass on a man and say this is his north:

                                                arrived North Platte 4 P.M.  


Such are my discoveries.


(You have to study the silence for clues.)

And what, I suppose, my religion is, is



                                   left North Platte 6 A.M.



                                                                   beautiful morning



little chilly




                                                                   oil road into Cheyenne


              stopped to get car greased


                                                       arrived Laramie 6 P.M.



some roads are cut through rock