as far as we know,

it went on forty years,

the driving by, first,

then, the driving up near,

watching

from across the road.

that is the woman, she’d say,

who stole your grandfather.

by that time, both were old,

abandoned,

and he ended up dead.

my mother said,

as a little girl,

she’d been sent to deliver

an envelope that would ruin

the old woman in the chair

forever.

it didn’t. life did.

or didn’t, depends

on who’s telling it.

anyway, my mother

has a half brother

the exact same age,

an unknown uncle

showed up at the grave,

grieving the father

he never knew

alongside a half-sister

there to grieve, too.

what did she see,

when she looked at the porch,

forty lonely long years later,

or thought of the chair’d temptress,

who had somehow made her?