I couldn’t find it for months, the bracelet that
she insisted had to be on the dining room table,
the one I could not find on the dining room table,

nor in her bathroom atop the slender medicine
cabinet jammed with jewelry and all manner of creams
and emollients that she meant to use but didn’t.

And when I finally did find it, in a tote bag that was,
to be fair, near the dining room table (how on earth…?),
she was nearly gone. But it did not stop me from invoking

the name of our long-ago elementary school as I
hollered, “Eureka! I found it!” and relocated it to her
bathroom with the approximately 242 pendants

tangled on various hooks and jewelry stand, telling
my sister, “We are not losing this thing again.”
She agreed because Mother—who hadn’t worn

the charm bracelet in years and couldn’t have seen
most of the charms on it, having outlived most of her
vision—was frantic that we find it, but never said why.

My sister was all for donating it with so many other
pieces of jewelry, but I brought it home where I now
study the trinkets as if they contain the secrets

of the universe, which they might, for all I know,
in the 22 little silver milagros that held significance
for her—from the mini buffalo to the spiral shell,

the labyrinth to the sunflower, from the angel to
the cowboy hat to the headless horse, from the circle
of dolphins and the feather to the turtle to the seastar.

I keep touching the hand with its widespread fingers,
a cut-out heart in its palm—the place, perhaps,
where the love she so craved had leaked out,

the portal she hovered over for much of her charmed life,
trying to collect all the touchstones she could
to fill the unfillable hole.