What Was Kept

I grabbed some of your things

from the cluttered, downstairs room

tins and scraps, notes without meaning, 

two shirts.

Like everything else in that house,

They were stale

thick with smoke and yellowed by neglect,

though you hung them with a care,

that I knew was pride.

Shirts not worn since before I was born, but still you held on.

You held on.

In my desperate attempt to hold on, too

in the midst of what grief does to a daughter,

I grasped at those things, anything

as if they would disappear as quickly and as absolutely as your body did,

when they carried you away.

In your wake were the fragments of our shattered lives,

in that muddied wasteland of us

a junkyard of immortal love trapped in mortal law

gripped by an animal-like sorrow, packing shirts into a broken vintage suitcase

Whatever would fit before leaving.

That night I knew nothing of the relief I had felt,

in the moments after waking up that morning,

in the moments between knowing and not knowing 

when you told me in my dreams,

you were free from all that now.