I’m not interested in a single
thing in this museum case.
Not that coin, filthy, ancient.
Not that little marble phallus.
Not this tiny Isis, or this
Byzantine slave bracelet, or that blue-
green shard of Roman glass.
What I want is that
lost shoebox full of faded snapshots back.
But I moved too many times
when I was young.
Couldn’t settle.
Didn’t care.
A friend’s garage.
My ex’s basement.
A rented storage shed.
And now my grandfather is still there, waiting
in a worn-out chair, half-
awake, a book
closed in his lap. He
held strange beliefs
and drank too much.
Collected things.
He made a lot of noise
the day he died.
I was a child, not in the room
itself, but also not outside.
Years later
my mother would admit
it might have been wrong to leave a kid
in front of a television
set for seven hours, listening
to that. But I
was sloppy drunk
when she said this,
and she was dying, too, by then, and if
I hadn’t been so careless
for so long
with my possessions, I could show you now
a photo of his face.
Instead, it’s in some box I left someplace.
Some Greek soldier’s drachma, wasted.
Some Roman housewife’s broken vase.