Straws
an elegy
Down from the top closet shelf
go all the novels I have already read,
the coffee table art books,
my cloth and leather baby bibles,
and I find a tattered 1925 red hardback she gave me called
The Sunny Side of Life
I pack brown boxes for my new house
and all the space I will have for my books
She gave this one to me in one of my Depressions
or one of hers,
after someone I loved died
or a particular breakup — I do not remember, but
it was in the epilogue of one of our losses.
She understood pain
how it calls out for union and silence
She marked three poems for me
I recognize her scrawl in a single star
Stained cream pages flake,
pieces eaten by time;
and there has been a printing error ?
Uncut pages hide poems inside the folds
where a reader should be able to turn the page
but cannot
Stranger still
she put plastic straws inside the locked pages
like bookmarks
in the spaces of the poems I cannot reach or read
She was not the hesitant grandmother,
afraid to take a knife or garden hoe
to anything
I have come of age enough to see her life as long,
longer than I thought it was
and to release the claim her pain made
on us
to defray it
Decade after season, she searched for the sun.
I have so many questions.
