Tends to Drift

The shoebox smelled of cedar and old tape.

I found it on the top shelf, helping her escape

one house for a smaller one—the kind

with a call button and a morning designed

by someone else. Inside: a yellow card,

blue ballpoint, tends to drift. Not hard

to read. My name in my own hand

on the back, in case it got lost. I'd planned

for nothing. Third grade. She kept it anyway,

thirty years in a cedar box. Today

I sat on the floor of the emptied room

and heard her laughing in the kitchen—gloom

of January at the window,

the movers taking the last things out.

The shoebox open beside me.

Cedar coming off it in the cold.

She kept this.

That's the whole thing.