For three years you lived in your house <br />just as it was before she died: your wedding <br />portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging <br />in the closet, her hair still in the brush. <br />You have told me you gave it all away <br />then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation <br />cross she wore, her name in cursive chased <br />on the gold underside, your ring in the same <br /> <br />box, those photographs you still avoid, <br />and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed— <br />small things. Months after we met, you told me she had <br />made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft <br />and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath <br />her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.<br /><br />Claudia Emerson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/artifact-4/
