Placerville, California

Its name was Old Dry Diggins in the Gold Rush days.

But now it could be anywhere along a foothills river—

woodland-chaparral, arbutus, canyon oak, madrone,

miner’s lettuce holding drops of rain, no lupine yet

but soon.

The woman’s house—pale rugs and chairs,

white winter sun, a smiling photo of her husband,

three years dead, herself set lightly on a sofa

and translucent to the afternoon.

A daughter barbecues.

A grandson tends his toddler running down the hall.

The baby drags a xylophone into the living room

and sings to her great-grandfather inside his picture frame.

Nobody speaks of faith, but it is in the air—

the dead man’s smile, the luminescence of his wife.

She resurrects a tablecloth I’d made—back-stitches,

running stitches, knots and chains,

and I remember

sewing it, my hair, too heavy, falling in my face. I wasn’t

thinking then of world to come—this place that could be

any place, a grief, two daughters and a grandson

and his child, eternally begotten, light from light.

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JOYCE SCHMID is a poet whose recent poetry appears in Literary Imagination, New Ohio Review, Antioch Review, Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals and anthologies.