Wyoming

If you can get out of bed and lift your limbs heavy off warm sheets, why can’t you understand? Good memories make me think of willow tree angels, weeping willows, weeping, then you 

Holding baby; this photograph, one of the few I have of you. You’re camera shy—because your eye, a little swollen, gray, glazed over, noticeably blind. You look happy and I think of you like that. I’ve seen you cry so often, at least once every day for every year I’ve been alive. Behind you Christmas, round old-fashioned bulbs. Your gift that year, an oak family tree: you and dad, sister and husband, me and husband, sister, brother, and you can’t hang that board in the house anymore.

The photograph reminds me of Wyoming, the home I removed myself from. You looked at me from across the kitchen, said, “You didn’t even try to make it work?” and I know you want me to cling 
like you did
like you do.

I try to remember you not crying, and I forget.