1. The stone you found, perfectly smooth, with a ring around it, the unbroken ring signifying big magic, wishes granted (dangerous), living core.
2. A sofa, flowered, with mahogany legs, reupholstered once but finally abandoned when its springs rusted and seats sank. You and your son wept when he dragged it away.
3. A firefly in a jar.
4. Five dogs, lost to:
old age
old age (buried with beer and coffee, his favorites)
old age but not at the river where he’d gone to rest, rather alone in a cold cage at the vet. For which you are still so sorry
a car hurtling around the corner, throwing her into the air like a pile of fluffy white rags
old age and a car (blind and deaf, oblivious, on his way back to his favorite trail in the woods).
5. So many lovers. What you carry of each of them: his poems; their hands; a smile; smell of cigarettes, of gin, of soap, of the body’s particularities.
6. A monarch caterpillar.
7. Adobe walls. The room at the back of the house in Santa Fe where you lived for one summer. The dry sun and the rain clouds every evening over the far-away mountains. A man there who wore black socks to hide the holes in his leather boots. He held you and you lied to him about your plans. You hitchhiked home and trusted that no one would harm you. No one did.
8. That stone you found. Left on the beach for the breaking waves to carry and leave for some other searcher.
