For JoAnn

on the Sunday two weeks before you leave us

Marney and I crawl into bed with you

we cry together we laugh at the grand joke the blunder of the universe

what the hell we say this is crap you say

I rub your feet you describe the rough bundle of your anger

how you left it in a heap on the ground

you are on a new path now and that thing was a great weight

and you show us the sketches the twiggy wild haired women in sturdy shoes

your middle of the night notebook and the sentence to your poet friend in Ireland

you meant to ask to use his poems but you wrote bones instead

same difference we reason

we talk about the Hag her story your story of seeking her the story you will not finish

so you charge us with the telling

and we cry some more together

on the Sunday one week before you leave us

we gather a Hag circle round you 30 women at least

smashed into the church of your bedroom

you might be the shrine stone herself

Cailleach Bhéara

you are small though not diminished frail but the silence in this sacred space is such

that we receive every word

you give us once more your father’s dying words

one hundred women with push open the gate

you remind us of our responsibility to this message

you speak we listen we breathe with you we don’t want to tire you but hate to leave

and no one really knows the protocol for such a gathering but

then dear Verna faints

you chuckle at this the release

and the Circle is broken

on the Monday before you leave us

I drive down route 6A in the gloaming

paper bag on the seat

I bring real Irish mead or at least he said it was real Irish mead

Marjorie is there we laugh about your pillowcase

a repurposed cashmere sweater and your blanket likewise gray alpaca

stitched together with fat thread a hag’s shawl you have made

you are a queen we sip the honey wine together from earthenware cups

toasting you toasting the ingenuity of hags

I add another budim Russian for simply we shall be

I kiss your feet tonight

understanding time is very short

budim dearest hag budim Cailleach Bhéara we shall be

on the Thursday before you leave us

I am cleaning in my sadness needing the task

purging the stacks and piles paper clutter hoarded scraps

I open an old journal before it goes to recycling and there on the page

a poem for you I wrote five years ago when you and Charlie rented the pink house

I tear it out and take it and leave

drive too fast the weather has cleared the day glitters with wet leaves

the time is too near precious space with your family so

I may just stand on your lawn and read it

but the front door is open I see straight through to your bedroom through the window beyond to the sea the same water that laps the shore at Coulagh Bay

Jennifer nods you’ve come to say good-bye she says

I kneel next to your bed and tell you I found a poem

I cannot do better work in this world than to read this poem to you

you understand you nod and smile

and I read this:

as he lay dying

Mr. Hughes told his daughter JoAnn that

100 women would push open the gate to the future

such a statement for her old dad to make but he told exactly the right person

his JoAnn in her plain linen flax homespun

her socks and birkenstocks sensibility

her straight-talking floppy-hat look-you-in-the-eye-and-nod-silently way about her

she received his message wrote it painted it packed it up and took it to Ireland

trudged it across the shale the peat the rocky heath down the Kilcatherine road

delivered it to the great hag herself

Cailleach Bhéara! I have news! 100 women will push open the gate!

freckly hag glorious hag our girl a prophet from the west

on Irish earth to meet her ancestors

to speak to the great mother on our behalf

JoAnn peering out the upstairs window of the pink house

scanning the horizon for silhouettes of wild-haired women in sturdy shoes

women dancing

the land the rocks rang with their singing she joined them

JoAnn standing on the ground the shoulders the bones of her forewomen

she communed with the hundred gone before her

made safer the way for the hundred still to be born

she met the hag

and brought her home to us