Memory of a Song

Kathryn Boudouris

By the time you disappeared, you’d been gone
for a while. You faded out like the last FM station
along a prairie highway, and the rest of us drove on
because we had no way to stop.
Some days, in the beginning, the wind
 
would shift and carry your voice back to us
in a murmured saying or a tune you hummed—
a tune recorded deep in your cells,
though you no longer knew what it signified;
a tune that had played in the home we left behind.
 
Was it like that for you? Did you ever
hear a note in your daughter’s voice—
a tremor like the first time she fell in love—
and remember her clearly?
Did she suddenly make sense again?
 
—and in your mind, did you encounter
a dark-haired woman, with an alto-toned laugh
and a sturdy way of loving, bearing her family
down the highway like a three-seat Pontiac wagon,
and think, “That used to be me”?

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Kathryn Boudouris studied creative writing as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan before attending Yale Law School and practicing law for several years. She now works as a librarian and lives with her wife in Charlottesville, Virginia.