Collector

by Conyer Clayton

It was my wedding anniversary but I forgot / trailed into a day that’s not / I glued the pieces of a broken necklace back together / I only wear jewelry I got before him, or
after / certain objects re–become and un–generate / dry
rocks crumble themselves on a bookshelf / sometimes the
pieces are worth keeping sometimes they fit back together perfectly and you don’t even get your fingers stuck together in the process / but more often

a rock reminds you of the ways you distort yourself / glacial
silt from Iceland / a smooth meditative
stone stripped from a gully on the coast of Scotland
a shell that was too fragile for a chain / It would’ve worn
through the middle
most of them
I can’t remember — but