In the grip of a nor’easter, you come bearing grief, have in pieces not come in peace. You arrive bladed with certainty. You slam shut the car door and smolder before the locked cabin, rough trip up the Hudson as you distracted yourself with a list of flowers awaiting deft penmanship to groom them tight and blow them clean. News of your brother’s death intercepted your drive to this residency, fellowship among the crude Madonnas of empty mailboxes draped in robes of days-old ice. You have not written about the passing of family before, their antagonistic absences. Intrusive their teething tombstones in the brain. Pill after pill to sleep, to create, to erase, you swallow and scratch into a notepad what the frozen earth refuses: bougainvillea, lilac, burning bush. Another close kin added to the Bible’s kept obituaries. You hated your brother’s left eye, unruly wanderer settling away from you and observing a world you could not sense. Glossy ivy in all its tenure, the tender fingers of buckeye. The white page frozen before you like rime. You dig and discover what you already knew: decaying kin, meandering roots catching his beautiful ankles. You were looking for a way out through beauty but beauty only goes where needed. On the pad you write: enough what you’ve had, how much more of you there is, how much of you will be left when you’re gone.