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Would it help you to know your name fell away from her
in her life’s last minute like flour
from arthritic hands, like silt blown free
of a river’s driftwood? That she forgot she ever saw you

skipping across your creek, three steps
across three stones? She could only remember: snow
and urgency, her own light leaping
across near-frozen water. She flew to warn her husband’s family
of those revenuers descending from the distant city,

dark-suited prohibitionists
coming to take the liquor, to burn the stills,
to mock those moonshining hillbillies
they were coming to rob. They could only picture long beards

and Civil War shotguns, imagine the smell
of all those dark mouths with their crooked teeth. Like you,
they could not imagine one snowflake
landing on the braid of a lithe and fearful girl,
frozen white thumbprint disappearing