In the local Savings & Trust I descend to the corridor below street level. A woman sits in a cool gray light updating client info, filing her nails, text messaging. I step up to the bulletproof window, slip my ID into the slot, smile, and wait. She looks from my photo to my face. “Which one?” she asks. “The smaller one,” I reply. I am not able to say my ex-husband’s name in this ceremony of twenty years. “Yes,” she replies. And as she takes her key and mine, I think about this box as incomplete transaction: old wedding bands, diamond earrings twice worn, and Mother’s jewelry—inherited and rarely worn. No—never worn. Safe keep. Kept here. From myself.

Then there are bonds for the children. (I haven’t ever checked the other one containing the deed with the new husband.)

•

What is down the hatch?

(A penny-sized harmonica, a pea-sized magnet, button batteries, jacks!)

What then is the fourth question?

(What does that mean, safe?)

To whom does the extracted foreign body belong?

(If you tuck a crucifix under your tongue, Mama then can’t hunt it down.)

Too hard to swallow? Or, swallow hard?

(Nicole’s missing charms: sewing machine, thimble, Mother)

•

The why:

playing around wicker chair

playing with a tin cup containing a white pearl button

alone on floor with lucky-shell bracelet

put toy in his mouth to hide from sister

child alone in room found hairpin under pillow

bored or unhappy

•

Dr. Jackson’s Aphorisms:

Let your left hand know what your right hand does and how to do it.

Let your mistakes worry you enough to prevent repetition.

Nature helps, but she is no more interested in the survival of your patient

than in the survival of the attacking pathogenic bacteria.

•

Yes, how to extract a barrette without further scarring?

How to store the object of your ardor, even to stay what harms

(junk drawer, purse, . . . flash drive)?

Yes, how to persevere

long enough to sound an alarm? to be alarming?

•

Somewhere I have a palm-sized clock,

green with a cartoon face,

that Daddy bought for me at the hospital

when we visited Mother, who’d just had a baby.

And could that toy

be tucked away with puka-shells, miniature sleigh, and

—and really, has the point of an object lesson come down to this—

Mother’s plastic collar stay?

•••

A Dusting

However Mother has reappeared

—say, as motes on a feather duster—

scientists say the galaxy

was thus created. This daybreak

she seeds a cumulous cloud.

•

Wherever Mother is bound

she’s joined ashes ashes

or dirt underfoot or bits

off Tower North and Tower South.

Repurpose does not arrive whole cloth.

•

From stardust, dust bunnies,

Dust Bowl and Dust unto Dust

to Ruykeyser’s silica, Whitman’s boot-soles

and Dunbar’s What of his love, what of his lust?

to the samples that astronomers collect—

dust is where the sparrow bathes herself.

•

“Not a cloud in the sky,”