The Shape She Left

The gloves didn't fit.

I pulled them on in my kitchen, not thinking,

and they closed around a hand that wasn't mine.

The suede had molded to her—the curve of her thumb,

the way her fingers tapered, the small space

between her index and middle finger where she held

a pen, a cigarette, a coffee cup I remember

but have never held the way she did.

Inside, the leather was worn almost translucent

where her thumb lived. The ghost of thirty years

of reaching, holding, gesturing in meetings

I never attended, with people I never knew.

On the left cuff: a water stain, dark and raised,

from a rainstorm she drove through in 1987

or 1993 or some year I wasn't alive for yet.

The stain had darkened the suede, raised the nap,

made that cuff look like it had been through something

the other one hadn't.

I sat with them in my lap for twenty minutes,

these small leather things that remembered her hands

better than I did. I tried to fit my fingers

into the shape she'd left, but my hands are different—

wider at the knuckle, my thumb too long.

I took them off. Put them back in the closet

in a box marked "mother's things," which is a kind of

lie, because they weren't her things anymore.

They were her, or what's left of her,

waiting in the dark for someone whose hands

they might actually fit.