What I Did With Your Ashes

Shook the box like a maraca.

Stood around like a dope in my punch-colored dress, clutching your box

to my chest.

Opened your plastic receptacle, the size of a jack-in-the-box. But instead

of gaudy stripes, your box is sober-suit blue, hymnal blue.

Tasted them. You've gained a statue's flavor, like licking the pyramids, or

kissing sandstone shoulders. I mean boulders.

Remarked to your box: "REINCARNATION comes from roots meaning 'to

be made flesh again.'"

Stowed your box under my bed for a week to seed dreams in which you

advise me. (This didn't work.)

Opened the Babylonian Talmud at random. Read aloud to your gritty,

gray-white powder: "There are three keys which the Holy One, blessed be

He, has not entrusted into the hands of any messenger. These are: the key

of rain, the key of birth, and the key of the resurrection of the dead."

Worked myself up to watery eyes. Any intensity evaporated the instant I

stopped reading.

Tried to intuit your format, sift it from tides of void. Does shape play a

role? My watch ticked in an exaggerated way. Closed my eyes, sent forth

mental tendrils seeking the nothing of you. They curled back on them-

selves, weaving around the wing chair, a dog's leg, a lamp stand, eventu-

ally heading back toward the nothing of me.

Copyright Credit: "What I Did With Your Ashes" from Scattered at Sea by Amy Gerstler, copyright © 2015 by Amy Gerstler. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.