I Want to Hold Tender

By Sara Rosenberg

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What I want is the buttery light of our kitchen
and my mother’s last lemon chicken.

What I want is your memory of snow
falling on larches. I let go the trails 

you carved into the woods, each child’s 
name knifed in timber. I dodge the lanky spiders,

leave your cicada shells to march along the sill.
Where would I keep it, your collection of rocks 

and my mother’s spent tubes of paint?
I say someday I’ll read your margin notes, drink in 

the fading ink, but I let slip the loose pages—
paper’s scattered white petals.

To downsize you to a smaller house,
I am culling the seven decades of your life.

I stack the reams of slides and stories you tell–
days camped at timberline in drifts of snow, 

the fox that leveled its gaze at you, 
alone together in the wild nowhere. 

I find the minerals with penciled names, 
boots crusted with a mountain’s silt

that carried you to the ponderosas
and the agates you faceted into my rings.
 
And now, you doze in the living room 
in a cone of light. 

I want to hold tender every last thing, 
but I cannot contain it, not here, 

where the blown leaves scatter and vanish. 
I drag the trash can to the curb under a sky scarred 

with stars, your trees a dull scratching 
against the eaves. How I will miss

your house, its shadows blue along the bear grass
and prickly pear patches, its nests of sleeping does.

When you do not come to the door, I step into the mouth
of your foyer, where your breath floats in off the mildew

and roses, your skin the paper before it molders, 
your lungs the books heaving with our dust.

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Sara Rosenberg’s poems have appeared in Pine Row Journal, Passengers Journal, and the Ocotillo Review. She lives in Austin, Texas.

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