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Finn arrives to the valley and vineyard first in fall. The light makes a last slide through trees and coats needle beds and mushroom nests and old snag stumps weathered and eaten thin, while grazing slowly a field turned dim of day are four elk, graceful and colossal and minding their hooves, swiveling their ears.

We see it: the glare of Finn’s windshield, the dust’s drift behind, her tires’ weave in the speed and grade of potted gravel road. There’s a dart of arm and empty hand, sunglasses misplaced somewhere not the dash nor her lap nor the seat beside her crushed by a crate of books spine-up and old warped cassettes, and on the rear bench-seat the sweatshirt shed back when the driving was hot, the day and distance sticky, Finn’s knuckles bleached to not sleep in a summer burst of final heat and that sweatshirt thrown then as if there was her room and she returned from work, a violent bike ride. If a lover were present she might be about to be loved.

We aren’t sure she’s coming until she’s here in her hatchback whose motor drives unlike any of our road’s rest, or the train or the river howling rocks or the wind weaving trees or the cats and coyotes through the grasses after toads, ducklings, button bucks, voles.

I told you, someone mutters to the sink, the clothesline, a stove’s black oily belly wilting dinner’s varied skins and leaves, and someone calls to say I think but let’s wait, let’s see, and the three A sisters, in their yard after eating, kick a stitched ball that stings shins and tender thighs before the eldest stills and then the middle and middle copy and their placements – within beds raised in vegetables and table flowers and bees’ lovers and a gallery of a season’s webs (a yard that once grew vast grass, a bit of tree, a map of this and that deer and those from out in that other thick and long field come to crop) – their placements are shadows lost in shadows of stalks and seedy faces, obese leaves and spiky silhouettes, and the hammock arch of squash and the squats of hung tomatoes and there’s Finn rounding the curve, the sun in her windshield a blindness that beats us so we’re only the sounds of our sinks wasting water, the irritation in our skins of wait.

Ara, a middle, has the longest, loosest hair, and Finn should by now see the girl’s head glowed in high swaying, swirling lengths, the light acting like hot air or smoke and lifting still to ceiling sky, leaving Ara’s face a darkness, and we’re all of us putting eyes else places than ourselves, and a knee’s grabbed by a grip for an apple, a mallet, a wet bundle of sheet, while Kingston stands his across-river lawn riffling pockets, the bared backs of his legs chickened by breeze through his fine old hairs. Georgeanne throats something tuneless and dry behind a screen and he remembers a girl and a dress worn and washed to ash fine, a baby’s furred head, the river's winter roar; he hasn’t had a baby in years, not to hold or to sing to or to bottle in the dark across a floor of boards talking what was so many lifetimes before: the drafty schoolhouse raised and abandoned and raked, the post office gone to ghost, and all the dead rail-men in pound rhythms for spikes and ties and tracks and shouts and in the sudden parked silence of Finn’s arrival across the water from his own old stead Kingston recalls an un-Georgeanne back in their rumpled, night stained bed, and their baby, and what he had then to say.