Remembrance

About what we don’t learn - this is life,
the worn slacks that belonged to you, packed
away between crates of pantyhose and Christmas
decorations; I didn’t realize their impact

until you showed me the importance of
remembrance. Oma - the name I repeated
as a child, the trips to Delaware with air you could
slice with a knife and hanging gardens of succulent

life ready to be plucked; this is what I remember.
Those old photographs - can’t you see them -
dusty, yellowed moth’s wings screened with an ink
from the past and the bleary eyes that stared back

from them. That was a time apart from mine,
calloused with the scraping of pennies against
palms. You must have worried back then.
I worry too. The fingers of time push hard against

my back, propelling me into a cobwebbed future.
How do I chisel a life for myself out of a block
of stone? Michaelangelo had a vision; all I see
is a white marble slab before me, with nothing but a few

veins of promise running though its rough surface.
To give breath to Pygmalion. To return to the past.
This is our task - to share the remembrance of
worries, the way breathing begins to hang like ivy in

the blue night. The chrysanthemums bend to
listen. And suddenly, a clear shot in the darkness,
icy fresh as the past overwhelms me once more in the
soft leather couches, holding rusty picture albums as

your weathered hands sift through the moth wings you
call photos and the presence of home slaps me in
the face with the realization that
remembrance is my heritage.

And you are with me.