We dress up to lay our dead down—so ceremonial,
even though there’s no such thing as buried. Disassembled,
sure—my mother a heap of shards by now, twenty years on—
but hardly underground. Mainly she’s here, a ramshackle
ghost in need of repair. She haunts the hardware store
where my husband sifts through bolts and rings
for customers intent on resurrecting broken things. Everything
fails with time but lingers, waits to reassemble.
Let me tell you what I’m trying to do, customers say.
Let me tell you what I need. And he finds the very thing
that works. The coffee grinder grinds again, the plate’s
undropped—mending being a kind of memory (like words)
a bringing back. Though when I think of all my mother
wanted still to do—how not quite ready she was to die
and how alone (the rest of us a thousand miles away
and not a clue)—I wonder where the bolt for that is,
the hinge, the metal plate to cover up the hole; the screw.
