TWO POEMS

day was “horrible, horrible, horrible” and the only way to handle it was to act, to do something, to move forward. He explained the symptoms of grief to me as though I had not experienced them myself, as though I had not been as lost.

It was obviously important to him that I recognize his motives, the way he didn’t see beyond his pain. But that is exactly what I recognize, one of the aspects of his grief that feels familiar to me. He did not see beyond his own pain. He didn’t see me.

Listening to him, I realize that while sorrow can open you to empathy and connect you to others, it can blind you to anything beyond the spotlight of your own turmoil. It is easy to revel in anger and blame, use it as justification for selfinterest. But I don’t want to live that way. I don’t want to lose sight of others in the walled-up darkness of my own hurt. For me, this means coming to accept that I can’t keep my mother, or anything, whole, that I will never know everything there is to know.

And if I’m being entirely honest with myself, I know that the absolute essence of my mother doesn’t reside in the flower press or the painting, in the lost clothes and kitchen gadgets, in the photos or scraps of handwriting, or even in my memories, because I don’t believe it’s possible to gain total possession of someone you hold dear, just as you can’t lose them completely, either, even if you try. My mom is in the note she wrote about the box, but that’s not all of her. She’s in my father’s mind, but that’s not all of her either. These are pieces, real pieces, just as any encounter with another person, living or dead, is an incomplete glimpse, one drop of a moving process colliding with one drop from another. We’re currents of human drift passing through, meeting and parting like clouds.

This doesn’t mean I’ll let everything go or stop turning to stuff to find and make meaning. I’ve grown to acknowledge that each of us operates under our own scheme of material representation, that the personal project of stuff is aligned with the pursuit of self. Some seek refuge and liberation in refining their things, while others accumulate or divest to prioritize status or conformity or individuality, and preservation can range from nurturance of relational bonds to unhealthy immersion in longing. Whatever the case, our stuff reveals how we wish the world to be. There’s no right way to relate to things, only the decisions we make and their internal, interpersonal, and environmental consequences, which are thorny and significant, and in all matters that stoke the human heart, we’ll find variety, peculiarity, self-destruction, and redemption — any and every story that can be told.

For my birthday, my dad sends a package and tells me to be on the lookout, which means it’s something old or important. When the box arrives, I’m confused to find two books with generic, freshly bound covers, Great Expectations and an Introduction to Literature anthology. I call him to find out where they came from and learn they belonged to my mother. The Dickens novel was her favorite book, and the other she’d had since college. He took them to a local bookbinder who put new covers on, gold embossed print on green and blue pebbled leather. “What did they look like before?” I ask. I’m wanting to picture them somewhere in her room, on her shelf. See if I can draw up a sensory memory of them from when she was alive.

“Oh, they were a mess,” my dad said. “One — the cover was falling off. You wouldn’t want it.”

I thank him for the books and thumb through them when we hang up, somewhat touched, but mostly irritated. They bring me nowhere, except for a signature I find in a youthful loop in the back, Eva, which I touch with my finger. I am sad that my dad still doesn’t know that I’d prefer the ragged copies with their personal resonance. I am sad that the books have been changed, put through another filter, another layer of separation from my mother. I put them on my shelf with all the rest, and in looking up at them, my attitude softens. The connection to my mother is not there, but I can imagine a time in my life when they will adopt new meaning, when I will turn to them when I want to remember my father. When I want to remember his generosity and his flaws, his unique character, the ways that, despite everything, he tried. I can see myself holding them between my hands to get a feel for him and the way we were together, all the ways we didn’t understand each other, and all the ways that we did.

TERROREM

KIKI PETROSINO

Every night, I go back to Mr. Jefferson’s place, searching still his kitchens, behind staircases, in a patch of shade somewhere

beside his joinery & within his small ice house, till I get down that pit, lined with straw, where Mr. Jefferson once stacked frozen slabs

of river water until summer. Then, visitors would come to him to ask about a peculiar green star, or help him open up

his maps. They’d kneel together on the floor, among his books lavish hunks of ice melting like the preserved tears

of some antique mammal who must have wept to leave Albemarle, just as I wept when I landed in Milan

for the first time, stone city where Mr. Jefferson began to learn the science of ice houses, how you dig into the dark

flank of the land, how you seal the cavity. Leave open just one small hatch through which I might lift, through gratings

Mr. Jefferson’s cold dressed victuals, his expensive butter & salads the sealed jars sweating clear gems of condensation, white blood

appearing from warm air, as if air could break & slough, revealing the curved arc of our shared Milan. There, I wore silver rings

on each thumb. I studied & spoke in fine houses of ice. I knew a kind of crying which sealed me to such realms

for good. Old magic weep, old throb-in-throat. How much of my fondness for any place is water, stilled & bound

to darkness?