Ethel and Charles, Willie and Phebe:
names with dates, without faces
in the faint northern Vermont
of my father’s family, circa 1900.

Ethel M. and Charles E. Antwine:
my great-grandparents in blood,
and nearly unrecorded. Ethel gave
her son of nineteen months to Millers:
Phebe, Willie. Charles, entered as “laborer”
on the boy’s birth certificate, proved
an empty line on the adoption paper.
Whether he left to labor elsewhere,
or if his labors ended without warning,
my knowledge of him stops with these scraps.

Ethel, widowed or abandoned mother,
dissolved her poverty family,
forged another with her signature.
Her son’s own children opened their eyes
in the one descent that then brought me
to birth. Charles, I live because you vanished.
Great-Grandmother Antwine, without means
to raise your son, you disappeared to us.
My grandfather Melton lost the altered “Antoine”
surname come down from Quebec.
This poem exists because I am a Miller.

David P. Miller