In a chilly barn along route 9 we left

the wood-stove’s shallow pool of warmth

to hunt for dead people’s cast-offs:

rose-painted chamber pots and ancestors

in stiff black, the women ranged

behind a paterfamilias whose mottled hand

rests on the head of a cane carved like a bulldog.

I considered a sampler stitched by Hannah, 1873,

in her fifteenth year, a pricked out four-square house

for my own four walls, a jaunty alphabet

and a homily: He sees the sparrow fall.

But the baby was crying. We had to do something,

and nothing calmed her but a walk in cold air.

Behind the barn a rutted track led into

a skimp of woods. Ahead of us, a man

swayed in a sag of sweatpants. I thought,

the worse for wear. We could have walked on,

but he stood before the baby’s stroller

and wanted to have words. You think

you can humor such simple questions:

your name, your town, the questions asked

at every final border. His house lay a little further

but he’d been squatting in the frozen woods

to watch for intruders. He considered the baby,

her angry, uncertain eyes and nut-brown cheeks.

He asked was she mine and then I saw the gun,

it must have been in a pocket or behind his back.

I stepped back and he smiled. Was the baby mine.

The gun was at the level of the stroller.

The gun was in his hand. Was she mine.

Her father said it’s OK, which is what he’d say

when he told me on top of a mountain

he was leaving for good, and I climbed the rig

of the fire watch tower and smoked for the first time

in years. They say it’s OK at the borders too

where all we have to show is the skin we have

in the game: our name, where from.

She’s mine, I said. I want to believe

it was me who turned first and dared

walk away, my back a necklace ready to spill

pearls into the frozen leaves, my muscle and fat

a thick enough shield to swallow the bullet whole.

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