Tell me life is more than an accumulation of mementos,
tangible things ensuring that when we are gone,
our life will still occupy some space,
a basement
stacked with old books and records and photos
those pieces of nostalgia our younger selves dangled
over the chasm but could not release, some forlorn call
whispering “someday I will come back to this,
and I would regret, eternally, throwing this away,”
so we ferry it from bookcase to bookcase, house to
house, until our granddaughter unearths it in the weeks
after our funeral, when our memories still have
the clean buoyancy of freshly settled snow.

She will wonder aloud, why would Grandpa keep
such a peculiar tortoise shelled stone? Slightly
bigger than a pebbly, but no one will know that you
spent a summer of your youth searching for this
pattern, wading through the morning surf
beside a pretty girl, taller than you, with lapis eyes
and new breasts, finding your own ways to
adolescence, feeling for the first time that this
world lacked permanence, was more beautiful for it

Your granddaughter does not know this, but
something stays her hand, compels her to keep
this strange polished stone as a reminder of her
own childhood, when you would make her root
beer floats, and she would fall asleep to the sound
of you and her parents fending off the mosquitoes,
laughing in a hush beneath the sounds of the lake

For a year this round little fossil is on her desk,
when she moves in with her boyfriend, it is
in her jewelry chest. Then he moves out, your stone
languishes until she can finally wear jewelry again.
Eventually it finds its way into her own basement,
jostled for space by the specific collections of her
life, because what use do we have for inanimate things?

None but to serve as causeways over the vast inlets
between us, reassurances of continuity stowed safely below

Sixty five years after you’re gone, one hundred and thirty
since your feet went numb in the cold, black dawn lake,
your great granddaughter stumbles upon a peculiar stone
buried amidst her mother’s old jewelry. Wars have been
waged, festivities celebrated for every cause man can
find. The world will be a bit older, lurching slowly
towards the dark, more crowded and more desolate and
more ruinous. “Why would mom have such a bizarre
rock?” she asks her brother. He shrugs, she pauses
a moment over the beguiling pattern before dropping
it into a garbage bag, never to think of it again.