Preserves

Preserves

Handles are shining where my life has passed.

My fields and walls are aching

in my shoulders.  My subjects are my objects:

house, barn, beast, hill, and tree.

Reader, make no mistake.  The meanings

of these must balance against their weight.

                                                                               

                                                                                Wendell Berry

While I sleep I am ignorant I am being

robbed.  Someone in the thin  winterish street

light is lifting up the  handle on my car

door, they are in and digging in my military

green canvas bag, and once inside, they find my black
leather wallet with its small embossed Celtic knot
of no going, pathless. 

They are lifting the lid to the center console

and taking a little tray where I keep a red corded

lanyard giving me permission to enter places

where scholars and Hasidic rabbis tell me

about Genocides and the Holocaust.  I’ve gained

a lower step now on the catacomb.  While I slept

the hands tossed the soft covered books aside

and when I went out and found Thoreau’s Walking

alone and at an odd almost falling off angle

on the seat I knew then what I’d lost: plastic

money and plastic keys for hospitals that say

I’m good to pay, like the time my son couldn’t lift

his chin or put it to his chest and they thought maybe

meningitis or when my daughter who was little

more than two was flung from a merry-go-round

an uncle spun too wildly and she landed…I was too far

away to see how, on what, head? bum? but she drug

her arm limp and swollen as a kielbasa up to

the xray table and waited and waited and never cried.

And too, other things swept into plastic: a funeral card

for my student Cydney, and my valet parking number
that I handed

to the boy after the wake and he fetched

my car for me and it was the first time

someone had ever done that and Cydney, fifteen, still

in her little white box, came home with me somehow

by that picture and I've kept her guardianship in my car since

and now she’s missing too and I think will those hands

that sift through all those pits of paper and plastic

maybe read the prayers on the back of that mass

card and maybe will they shake themselves awake

and walk away from this take take take this break

in this enter in to other people’s grief and eye

a dead girl fresh in her this is how I will remember you

image her mother chose from all the other snapchat options

after they’d picked out her urn, will they do the math

in their head will they maybe? And my kids’ pictures

in my wallet, when they were small and all the

tiny trinkets I could wax nostalgic on if they were given

back while I slept while I was being robbed while I sat

and was stunted later, Thoreau in my hands, or stood

looking though the mail in the glove box and found two

twenty dollar bills and gave later that day one of them

to a homeless man in Boston who was selling

books for a soup kitchen or a battered women’s home

I don’t remember but I had it and I had it to give

and I left the book in the rotunda of Fanieu Hall

for someone else to see while all of Boston

all of the morning lifted and descended around me

the police back home saying no, no, there’s nothing

they can do but thank you, thank you, I'm sorry
for your loss, and thank you for the call, we'll keep
an eye out, sleep easy please if you can if you're able.