Symbols

Bear With Heart

Tags sewn into your seams

Overseas humbled you even

Before you arrived in numbers

Fanning out to Walgreens

Coast to coast finally

Making your way

To mothers cluttered night

Stand next to her death bed

Jostling with molted TED hose

A forlorn incentive

Spirometer

Barber pole striped 

Candy milling aimless 

Across a signed glossy of Elvis

Who just happened to drop

By the nursing home in August.

A purple plush

Sporting a smart red jacket

Paired with a potent

Symbol of St. Valentine

Proved irresistible

To two solemn shift

Aides, girls in their late teens

Whose job it was to arrange

The body in tableau

While I got some air and made

The necessary phone calls. 

How else to explain how 
Two such as you had come to be

In the trunk of a rental car

At McGhee-Tyson Airport

Where you were stashed after

I plucked you from the casket

Looking bereft and broken

Slumped there beside her

Carefully folded hands.