There is a room in the network of my memory
a place my nanny built in stories and birthday cards
that is a garden that she tends
where all us grandchildren are.

Her imagination twisted us descendant girls with fairytales
and still we have been lonely
looking for ourselves in her portraits.

What we didn’t see was the whirring camera in the background
the quick capturer behind her eyes
that snatched our faces in loving light
and snipped pieces of our life.

We sat once, (just once,) together
by the sea-seeming lake superior
and the sky was the whitegrey
of sunlight burning through haze.

As she watched me swim
I felt her gaze like beating waves.
She held me outside time,
and silenced everything
with the thick, tense complexity
of all her lives and loves and memories.

She bound me to you with this fierce and foreign love
with stitches made of stories
and photos down the hall.

Carefully ripped paintings
left facing the rain
petals like soft mottled wings

I catch glimpses of your faces in all of her forgotten things.
And keep them pasted in the white sunlight
of the room she left inside me
where we hover, lovely, papery, defined by our remembering.