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
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.
