Just yesterday, at a shiva, my cousin
         Suzie told me poetry’s her thing.
She loves whimsy. You wouldn’t know it,

but she’s a whimsy-kind-of-girl.
         She wrote a series of poems about moonlight
dancing on her bedroom floor

until her teacher tore them apart—
         told her to write what she knew.
But that’s what she knew. So she wrote

about which she knew nothing—a nun,
         who dies as her cross slithers through
her mangled fingers. Her teacher loved it.

That’s when her father, Isaac—91—now
         my oldest living relative, chimed in to say
he’s a lover of poetry, too. His wife, Bess,

turned him on to it. “Epithalamion”—
         she lived her life by it. He closed his eyes
and said the whiles doe ye this song

unto her sing. But for Uncle Isaac, it was,
         and still is, “If.” He didn’t quote from it.
He shrugged the kind of shrug

that says as if I know.
         And on the car ride home, my mother
told me how his son had died at twenty-one,

and I wondered which if had most moved
         Isaac—the one that asks if you can
never breathe a word about your loss?