Three monkeys, none taller than an inch,
fused in bronze, back-to-back, their faces
each the size of my smallest finger nail,
the last thing I chose from my Aunt’s apartment
the day we emptied it—bauble, knickknack—
small enough to hold in my palm.
When I flip it
over, engraved in print so fine I have to raise it
up to the light—Crane & Breed—it’s from
a Cincinnati casket company. They made tiny bulldogs,
camels, monkeys—samples to help a loved one with
the difficult selection—copper, bronze, or steel.
My Aunt’s casket—we opted for cherry—reminded
of the orchard in her yard. And now this trinket
sits on my rainbow stack of Post-It notes, or—
more often—in my hand, rolling around like
an odd-shaped river stone.
And though it promises
to keep quiet, not watch my every move, not
listen to my thoughts, like a toy bewitched,
it starts to take up the whole room, the papers and
books, the pictures taped to the walls, the fleece
across my lap.
It floods the view through
the window glass—two-hundred year old oaks,
it fills the whole yard—the deer-eaten hydrangea,
the twelve burning bush I planted last summer
as she faded from us.
Warm in my hand—curiosity, what-not—I’ve no
idea why she had it, who was hers to bury.
But when I remember the year she took me with her
to Florida—just graduated from high-school,
my first plane ride—this trifle looms cloud-large,
sky-wide above the wings.
From my window-seat
halfway between heaven and earth, it shadows
Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia. It blankets
all of Florida—built on water—the flesh and
veins of it that drain to the sea we floated in,
the beaches we combed for shells and
bits of colored glass to hold.
