Mark Cox
Sill
On the kitchen sill,
in the square brick house
my aunt aged and died in,
the flawless hand-blown pear
will neither rot nor last.
My daughter, too young
to ever think of this again,
once took it down
and placed it in a bowl,
with the breakfast oranges.
She’d thought it lonely, I guess,
with just the sunlight against it,
that single breath,
exhaled, perhaps, just after lunch,
smelling of cheese and peach schnapps.
Dust is the pollen of our dying,
even children sense this,
and after she’d wiped it clean
with her flowered dress,
she held it suspended
by its delicate, disproportionate stem
and lowered it into the wooden bowl.
Her great-aunt, though,
had little patience with disorder,
couldn’t bear the clean, unblemished outline
where it had originally been,
and that was that.
Moments ago, after assurance that her family
would all recognize each other in heaven,
my daughter asked who would take care of her things.
And when I said her babies could, she cautioned
that babies can’t even take care of themselves.
Neither can we, of course, never tall enough
to reach the light switch ourselves,
never able to drink from the wall-mounted fountain of awareness,
we stuff our pockets with beads and bottle-caps,
we organize our knick-knacks as best we can.
My aunt’s squat, miniature tract house was razed.
Her window sill exists only in the heaven of children.
The pear, it could be anywhere,
like the last breath of the old German who made it.
Likewise, her porcelain salters
and the hummingbird still hovering
at its glass flower.