When did I turn it into an altar of sorts?
Did I gather the items one by one,
or did I collect them for a time
before installing them
in the mirrored chamber?

It wasn’t that I’d been avoiding
his bathroom or the medicine cabinet—
they’d been empty for quite a while—
but in the time of after
I found his baseball on a closet shelf,
scuffed and stained, and I palmed it,
wondering where the mitt he’d bought me
had gotten to.

And I looked up and saw him in the then,
tall and grinning in the backyard,
teaching me to properly throw and catch
the summer we moved into the house,
as we began to make it ours.

In the after
the baseball went to live in what
had been his medicine cabinet, with some
of his last guitar picks and magnets
of electric guitars. I added his favorite watch,
a single dogtag, two pairs of sunglasses,
a small metal film can with bits of his ashy self,
along with a square hunk of pine wearing
his scrawl in fat woodshop pencil:

toots
first cut
love cliff

Parachuting into the then,
I hear the whine of the new table saw
in our garage just outside the back door,
a portent of furniture to come.

Lately I open the medicine cabinet door,
when I need a hit of him—on anniversaries,
his birthday—to palm the baseball,
finger the guitar picks and magnets,
peer through the sunglasses. I pick up
the wood block and the film can that
rattles like a tiny maraca when I shake it,
along with four fishing lures in the shapes,
if not the actual colors, of slender fish.

And I lift his last coffee cup,
hold it as he used to, imagine it falling
to his lap after the final breath,
then put it back in its spot on the shelf,
feeling his smile, then close the cabinet door
with a small pat of a grateful hand.

•••

In memory of Clifford Ernest Polland (1952–2001)… for no particular reason…
just because I opened the medicine cabinet.