You get used to it,
she said, meaning the delicate
mechanism of the diamond
drop passed on from her mother.
She was fastening the clasp
around my neck, meaning
preparing me for the fumbling
that inheritance presents, meaning
death. You get used to it, she
said, meaning being inserted
into the dark and learning to call
it something else—the way
of all flesh, for instance. It’s
a box clasp: you slip a spring
into a box-like feature,
an 18th-century design modeled
after millennia of catches,
because the desire to hold
fast what we hold
dear is as old as sanity.
Great griefs are antidotes
for lesser sorrows. We patch
up loss with proverbs.
My hand goes absent-
mindedly to my throat,
as hers did, as her
mother’s did, searching
out the tear-shaped
drop: I’m not gone yet.
This poem appeared in the October 25, 2012 issue of the magazine.