(for Rebecca on her birthday)

•••

We love them as who we are now.
We love because that’s what’s left.
—Alberto Rios from “Five Years Later”

Going through each drawer, each closet,
opening every cupboard and pulling out
the large and the small,

the tiny treasures and the humdrum—
her nursing school pin,
her mother’s wedding ring,

none of it can you bear to part with.
Not her pie plates that caressed crumbly
crust, cradled the smooth center of her
cheesecake that was more pie than cake,
your late brother’s perennial birthday request.

The box of her elementary school drawings
and reports carefully penciled between faint blue lines
on pages sheltered in the dark for six decades,
still readable.

Every piece of sheet music neatly organized into
binders she tucked into a bag and toted to church,
propping them on the piano or organ, as required,
thousands of weekly performances, accompanying
singers, flutists, pre- and post-sermon,
at memorial services.

Which pieces asked to be played at hers?

You must take apart the life of the one who made
yours, whom you cherished beyond all others,
this tearing apart of house that matches the
rent in the fabric of you.

You, the adored daughter, bending to put your
mother’s sweaters in one more box, offering
things to helpers. Take it, take it! you plead,
anything not to try to figure out where to
put one more thing in your house,
in your heart.

As if she’s not there already, circulating
through you with every breath, her
greatest gifts given to you long before
you burst into the world,
before she taught you to breathe.