What I Kept

I kept the button from the coat you wore the winter the lists went up: brass, cold, and it warms against my thumb now, which buttons should not do.

I kept your uncle's poems, copied out in the other country's letters, ink still wet whenever I don't look. I don't look. It stays wet.

I kept the key to the house we can't go back to. Some nights it turns itself, soft in the drawer: a small report that the door still stands.

I kept the rain in your garden jar, the one you carried cuttings in. Kept rain keeps its weather: it falls in there. It has not stopped.

I kept your measuring tape, retracted at forty centimetres, the width of your shoulders. It will not run past that. I pulled. It knows.

I did not keep the red dress. You never sewed it. The pattern kept, the thread kept, the whole evening kept for a life you'd live when it was safe.

Some things keep themselves.

The dress hangs now in a closet no one built, in a house no one burned, sewn and worn where keeping cannot reach -

and I keep that too, the way you keep a light on: not to see by. So the road stays lit for whoever is still trying to get home.