Numb Fingers around a Warm Glass

Even a crushed or listless memory
is a little sweet, laying like the skin of a grape
in the spring grass, gooey insides already eaten;
much the same way shed clothes on the floor
puddle like petals and autumn, celebrating urgent messes that gust in our swelters;
or as the small clothes of children, now grown up and gone,
are tenderly held up and kept in plastic reliquary boxes
and preserved in old smelling wood drawers.
There you were, a child in my arms, and now
all grown you wriggle from these stories that capture me in scarlet stains.
The cedar smell blossoms in this November.