Elegy for Mrs. Abbot, Room 14

They moved the furniture out in an afternoon.“Thirty years of a life organized around other people's children,“boxed by people who never once sat in her chair“long enough to understand why the good pens were hidden in the second drawer.“

I kept one of her lesson plans, water-stained,“margins crowded with a handwriting arguing with itself —“not for the lesson. For the proof“that someone thought this hard about a Tuesday.“

I don't believe there's a room somewhere that remembers us.“I believe there's a drawer, somewhere, with the good pens still in it,“and that has to be enough shape for a life to leave behind.“