What Makes a Pearl

When she died, I took my mother's socks,

those fuzzy polka-dotted ones she'd worn

in hospice. I wore them all through winter.

Maybe that's creepy. But is it really so different

from the necklace she willed to me,

that single pearl clinging to its strand of silver?

The necklace isn't creepy. Every day for a year

I hung it over my heart, even in the shower,

even when it felt heavy as a beggar's first coin.

I want to say that having these things was like having a scar

but worse. In winter, socks are as inevitable as scars,

except there's more choice in it: when I was cold,

I chose which socks, and whose.

But I'm wrong. These tokens I harvested

from her deathbed are more like the pearl,

or rather, what makes a pearl:

that piece of sand, the irritant that the nacre

builds itself around, that tiny, everyday object

that, little by little, learns to glow.