96/365: a visit

Sitting at my desk
I suddenly started singing
a wordless melody -
a dirge like song,
with a oddly hopeful up tone

It seemed for a few bars
that I was intoning
notes I had known my whole life,
yet these were not my notes
but the notes of my grandmother
in house-Polish,
the Polish only spoken in western Massachusetts
among the older folk
before they laid down.

My wife asked what I was singing
and like that,
the notes were gone.