When my brother Tim reroofed Aunt Helen’s
house, she insisted he use, not expecting
to outlast them, the cheapest shingles.

Fourteen years later, under the no longer
new roof, I drink watery coffee and
watch Helen’s ninety-six-year-old

face and hands. “Mother’s been gone a long
time,” she says to me out of the blue.
Neither ill nor without appetite,

she’s lost forty pounds she can’t account
for, as if the flesh itself were
beginning to turn into memory.

I must take care not to admire aloud
anything in Helen’s house, for she’s likely
to think I’m asking for it, and send it

home with me, as she did a small yellow
ceramic cowboy-boot-shaped vase, today
holding a jonquil and two daffodils.

What I’d gladly accept is the framed photo
of Uncle Husky, who died on the operating
table at Luther, Christmas, Seventy-

eight, force withdrawal from whiskey
and cigarettes more lethal than his cancer.
White-stubbled, he lifts a freshly killed

buck by its antlers, his grin tempered, as though
aware of the end, not far off now…I can
still feel my new boots’ leather soles slipping

on the icy church sidewalk that winter,
my mind slipping on the fact of his loss.
Helen has lived in Husky’s absence

for a quarter-century, a school for letting
go. Her hands are loose skin over bone.
To them, things now are next to nothing.