For Sara Ellen, Going Home

Ninety-five Junes and the red clay still knows your name. Georgia took you back the way it takes everything — slow, patient, warm in the palm. In the kitchen the biscuits are rising without you. Faith is small again, flour on her chin, and you are chasing her past the screen door into a light that has not yet learned how to leave. Maters on the sill. A pot of beans murmuring to itself all afternoon like a woman half in prayer. You taught me that this is prayer. Daddy and the moonshine, the jar held up to a kerosene sun — how he laughed, how the laugh stayed in the wood of the house for years afterward. How yours did too. How it does. The shop on the corner. Tom’s, and then yours — The Jett Sett — thirty-five years of women rising from the chair a little more themselves. You touched their heads the way the preacher touched water: gently, and meaning it. Three million little books slipping into hands on the other side of the world. John, chapter one. In the beginning. You knew where the beginning was. You sent it in envelopes. Bells. Angels. A garden that forgave you every spring. Two husbands gone on ahead to set the table. Three daughters already there, waiting at the door the way you waited for them to come home from school. And Linda — Linda who has never been alone, not for a single hour of her life, because you were there, and now the others are there, the way a house keeps standing when one beam is taken because every other beam remembers how to hold. She will not be alone. You made certain of that the way you made certain of everything — quietly, across decades, without once calling it love because you were too busy doing it. And somewhere a girl is dancing — hips, scarves, a borrowed brass coin catching the lamp — and she is you, and she is laughing, and the laugh is the same one that rang through every room you ever blessed by walking into. Sara, the clay is red, the biscuits are warm, the river is close. Go on. We will find you in the small things — a bell, a bean, the wing of an angel left on a windowsill that we did not put there.