Two long, 24-inch drawers
three by four

one on each side under the desktop
filled with pens and colored pencils.

My mom drew her name on an inside drawer
in blue crayon when she was 10,

my pen runs over dimples in the wood
we all made.

I loved the smell of all those pencils
because my grandmother loved me.

Tonight—48 years after last drawing on it at age 5—
I pulled out a drawer,
inhaled the scent.

It is
          unchanged.

There was a black phone on the table,
party line,

I’d listen to old women talk,
wondering when I’d understand adult language.

Under a drawer
my mother wrote the name of a boy

          Billy Graudons

letters printed quickly
as her mother
would not have been amused
with writing on furniture.

Hours & hours I’d draw here,
and write my first letters.

I now remember the uneven surface
interfering.

Tonight my pen won’t write smoothly
as it digs into hundred-year-old mahogany.

Tonight I understand adult language.
My father she had not met gone.

*

Last trip I cleaned the lichen off the family tombstones
with a wire brush and water.

Thought of spraying herbicide on it this time,
but decided to let it grow.

—Little Falls, New York, 7/16/14