End of summer: the spruces put out a few green shoots.

Everything else is gold—that's how you know the end of the growing season.

A kind of symmetry between what's dying, what's just coming to bloom.

​

It's always been a sensitive time in this family.

We're dying out, too, the whole tribe.

My sister and I, we're the end of something.

​

Now the windows darken.

And the rain comes, steady and heavy.

​

In the dining room, the children draw.

That's what we did: when we couldn't see,

we made pictures.

​

I can see the end: it's the name that's going.

When we're done with it, it's finished, it's a dead language.

That's how language dies, because it doesn't need to be spoken.

​

My sister and I, we're like amazons,

a tribe without a future.

I watch the children draw: my son, her daughter.

We used soft chalk, the disappearing medium.