A Hundred and Fifty Pounds

In some, the luggage lies open

like a mouth mid-sentence.

In others, closed zippers grimace:

What would you have brought?

Slippers, a stuffed platypus, a gold watch

on a chain, copper pots swaddled in bedding.

The hypotheses: that thinking

can be things, that each decision shrinks

the pained mind to the space

inside a suitcase. Include

lacquered chopsticks, silver forks,

a hammer scarred by rust, the orders

nailed to telephone poles and doors.

Omit what you whispered then,

most of what you’ve seen.

I was given forty-eight hours’ notice, twenty-four.

I passed ice and pines and plains.

I rode an iron serpent

into the Interior

beside four hundred others.

It was humid. It was cold.

If pain is remembered

to be dismissed. If fear still seeds

its rotting forest. This

is a gardener’s trowel, a blue skein of yarn,

a violin, a ukulele, a ukulele, a ukulele.

This is a porch light

flicked on and off in abscessed night.

There are pear blossoms falling

on the driveway like footprints in black ice.

Memories, river stones,

metamorphic and worn. How many

might an able-bodied individual carry

through livestock-stalls and mud,

onto a bus, a train,

into a tiny, uninsulated shack?

Most say the same: It could happen again.

It is happening now. I couldn’t

make room

for a dogless collar,

a hound's-tooth scarf, a steel urn

packed in Styrofoam, a letter

recording blood’s divisive fractions.

My father would not have come.

My mother.  My stepsister.  My brother.

What matters is not what you bring,

but what you keep.

She was there. He was, too.