The day my mother dies she shovels
sand into a beach pail to take home.

At the time, I don’t understand.
We have come to this shoreline

for eons, and we will return. But in the evening
she leaves me in her sleep, and I dream

I am buried in sand. Only then do I see
what she hoped to salvage: all the crystallized tears

of mermaids, the tooth dust
of sharks. Look, this lustrous one

might even be the singing bone
of a siren. She didn’t want to lose

a single grain. What is it like to love every morsel
enough to keep? Only now do I see

how ill-equipped I am to write an elegy
for every atom I have lost. I am angry

that sand is a singular noun
when it carries inside it a skyful

of dying stars. Now each morning
I place one grain on my tongue

and swallow the sacred
secrets it holds in its memory:

1. Not a single fragment
of this is for keeps.

2. If you look close enough,
you will find everything whole

is just a tender, deliberate gathering
of what has shattered.