Tell About That One

When you moved again,
deciding which pieces to bring
with you took days. Disappearing rooms
disappeared objets d’art.  Your
familiar touchstones were spirited away
along with your memories
which still totter in a multitude
of worlds lately, but you hold on
to a familiar question: “tell me a story
about that”.

We saved a few treasures in the purge.
The too-large postmodern painting of a
distorted violin fills the wall across
from where you sit most days. “Dad
bought that for you when you stopped
playing, Mom”.  You ask me every time
and many times each visit, and I remember 
for you again, how you saw it in a shop
and cried because your hands had stopped working, 
how you could no longer play, 
how there was something beautiful in
that gilded, fractured image
which, at the time, captured
the pathos of your circumstance. 

You played the violin.
until you couldn’t anymore. 
Your favorite artworks—
those we all lived with for years,
are fading stories from your long life:
the glass church, the rural landscape, 
weathered watercolor house in the distance,
wavering sea oats on dunes stretch
to their vanishing point.  Everything
reminds you of something, a place, a person
you adored. Now they lean unremembered
 against a dry wall in the barn. 

“ I love that. Tell me about that one.”, you say.
And I do my best and try
not to sigh. “It always reminded
you of your old violin, Mom. Dad
surprised you with it one day.”