though to my knowledge nobody had adequately explained the whereabouts of the goat.

Michael, Horace, Anne, and the other poets were drinking in the yard under the big oak tree and the sun was finally setting. It was a warm night in early summer and the evenings had not yet become the oppressive, thick, sleepless haze of August. There was a sweet smell of jasmine in the air and much laughter. Soon we would dance under a string of electric lights gathered from a shed that lurked in a corner of the yard. It had a red door that leaned off its hinges and smelled of motor oil and wood rot.

Someone brought out a record player and put on some Dylan. A new record, and not one that I remember hearing before.

Horace, I think, said that Dylan was speaking a new language. It was like a secret whistle and only a few people could hear it.

The other poets booed Horace and they all laughed again. I heard the names Woody Guthrie and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and for a moment the poets harmonized an old spiritual I recalled from my own youth, when my mother would take my sister and me to Bible school on the weekends.

Olivia sat in a lawn chair beneath the lights and smoked cigarettes. She laughed and sang along and booed Horace with vigor. She looked fragile then, it seems now, though I doubt she would have tolerated the observation.

We could not have known what would happen only a few nights hence in that hotel room in Newark, or how Jim would hang for it, by his own hand as the newspapers would report, in an empty barn three states away.

That night was the last night that we had together. None of us knew it. How could we? Years later, when Olivia’s journals surfaced, I found myself returning to a line from her poem Dreams of Alabaster that I could not remember reading before that summer, though perhaps I simply failed to recognize it.

“… winter is our truest desire, to be lost under the moon, alone, none of us, even alive.”