Leftover by Sarah Giragosian


 
 
I have un-marbled your lunch pail
of its patina of jelly, its bloom of mold.
What to do now but finger the clasp, locked like a jaw?

 

Each little elegy I write
steers me farther from you, and still there’s this groping
for form. I find the dusky petals of your fingers

 

on the window glass and the walls;
you are whorled along the blurred rim of my vision.
I don’t write about heaven, just the oculus-moon,

 

the opening I see from below,
while I assign structure to this grief. I’ll keep you
in shoe boxes, albums, drawers: you’ll have to be dug out.

 

I thumb the unmiraculous
detritus of your life. All’s qualified and blessed—
all the echoes and distillations of you: plastics

 

and boxers, the grimed towels strewn
and eddying around the door, the dandruff pearled
on the dresser, the sweat line plumbed down the threadbare shirt.

 

 

Sarah Giragosian‘s poems are forthcoming or have been recently published in such journals as Crazyhorse, Blackbird, and Ninth Letter, among others.