For Eleza
The succulents you plucked for me from the abundance of your yard and nested in a blue butter cookie tin with shells and stones for me to take home across time zones coast to coast not only rooted in their indoor plot of terracotta here in Baltimore but thrive so wildly I have to cut them back and even then new white pink roots and fat green baby fingers pull themselves up and out to propagate from the now calloused ends of once raw leaves and stems which is to say thank you. I have tried to let this growth exist a welcome fact without forcing it back at you as figure of though you thrive riven too. I have watched you dive through waves to disappear and then emerge out past the breaking with a smile and your hair in tangles and even this image of your actual figure need not stand as figure either just exist in fact of memory as do the grains of sand and bonfire smoke still clinging to my clothes when I unpack. I have smoothed plaster onto your pregnant belly and watched as it set to hold your shape the week before your first daughter entered the world through you. You know all this already but a litany of remember when is the closest that I can approach to prayer or spell as if words could conjure your mother or husband alive again with you. We say lifelong to mean always but both shift like shorelines. I used to believe in believing and thought that if life hurt it meant to trust that it was working like rubbing alcohol and all strong medicine. That was before I knew you or anything. In the past’s present you are making a mobile of driftwood. Long after your daughters look through its slow turning the shadows it throws still make sense of a relationship with light.