My grandmother kept secrets on featherweight
pages edged in gold, on impossibly narrow lines.
The ranch hands are more breathtaking than ever
this year, she spied from the horse barn,
and Mother’s friend from Ohio called her a willful child
after they rode away from the others.
She pressed a lavender wildflower against the ink,
guarded between covers of red kid.
She did not memorialize the buffalo jump
behind the ranch, its stark cliffs a daily reminder
that escape can be deadly. No mention of the blaze
that destroyed her father’s store, uninsured
when the town refused the cost of automatic pumps,
prompting the railroad to build its station elsewhere.
The weather is fine this fall, she wrote.
Went shooting with Ben.
I startle a covey of grouse who erupt from the aspens
lining the road to what might have been her home.
She preened family history. The widow who ran the flour mill
even after her arm was mangled in the grinder. The doctor
who drowned in an icy river, rushing to save a child.
She groomed her own story with slants of fortunate light.
The old barn before me, failing fence, and lanky grass,
are tinted sepia and rust under a Gallatin blue sky.
published in Stone Canoe