The longest piece within the collection is an essay, "Persimmons." I use the term "essay" loosely, for while it is written in prose like an essay, it doesn't lay claim to any point of persuasion, except in the vague sense of persuasion to a point of view, a view of life's unfolding, the passage of time, the death of one's parents. The essay is framed by a journey to an ancestral home. In the opening, the narrator calls to mind a story by Tanizaki concerning a man's journey upriver to his ancestral village. We accompany the narrator on a similar journey, but hers is a journey through memory that has, as its point of departure, the sight of a persimmon tree where "a hundred or so fruits hung like glowing lanterns from the slender boughs." The persimmons remind her of Tanizaki's story, where persimmons are offered as refreshment to the travelers, but more, the persimmons remind her of two trees that had grown in her mother's garden.

We are not sharing a journey to an ancestral home, nor are we witnessing an epiphany. This is not really concerned with the discovery that a hollow place lingers after parents have died, nor that the past is irretrievable, nor that things have changed irrevocably. These discoveries are given. Instead, what we share with the narrator is a sense of reconciliation. She tells us of the sense of abandonment that followed her mother's death, of the emptiness that came particularly when she had to clean out her mother's refrigerator. But the abandonment and the emptiness are recalled; they do not belong to the "now" of the narrative. Instead, we share in the intrusion of a growing calm.

There is a reconciliation, too, to the things that can never be communicated, perhaps because there are no words, or because they cannot be known. She remembers her mother's gardener, George, who was Japanese and not really named George. As a child, she often overheard her mother and George discuss the garden "though not once was I able to catch a hint of George's replies, which were apparently so understated that even the breeze failed to carry them for any distance." Perhaps she caught so little of their speech because they had an "intimate knowledge" so that "little explanation was needed – as though a tendril of ivy were itself a sentence, or a flower a burst of sentient feeling." Later, George returned to Japan, but she never learned the reason. Now, with her mother dead, she will never know the reason, but this not knowing seems not to trouble her.

It seems natural that as one works to a place of reconciliation with the loss of parents or of home, one also turns the reflective gaze on one's own life. For a poet, that might mean asking: what value is there in anything I have written? This question receives fierce scrutiny in the piece titled "A Bit of History." The narrator visits a town that has dwindled since the railway was re–routed. Now, an old trestle has been incorporated into a system of trails. But a boy has died falling from the trestle and the parents have left three poems at the site. They aren't good poems. "They were the sort of poems that say what they mean." But they are heartfelt, and now they seem to act as magnets, attracting other young people who are troubled.