It wasn’t quite prayer but the more I recited its words the more incantatory power they assumed. “What can I say to you, dar-ling,” I repeated to myself, “When you ask me for help?” It was early on an otherwise ordinary weekend morning twelve or fifteen years ago. The Long Island Rail Road car speeding me out east, not fast enough, grooved a quiet rumble into the day. The uncluttered spring sky looked like itself, only crisper, and Spicer’s poem was a tender bruise I kept pressing on to see how it would feel.Even earlier that morning, my phone rang me awake and I had that old sense of dread I used to get whenever my mother would call. She’s calling to tell me that Emily is not okay, I thought, the words “Mom Cell” aglow on the rattling night-stand. The thought was less a bolt of clairvoyance than a groggy intuition that a call this early in the morning could only mean something was wrong. That I correctly assumed the call was about my twenty-something sister, rather than an elderly rela-tive, was also a piece of subconscious logic. For a good part of the decade prior, phone calls from my mother meant yet more bad news about Emily.