Empties

It’s like Forrest Gump—or his mama, rather—says

about what life is like, though I think she

had in mind the mystery of it, the serendipity,

the good (mocha truffle) with the bad (pecan

nougat). What has caught my eye, this morning,

as I take the faded yellow lid from my

Lifetime-Supply!-sized Whitman Sampler,

with its 25,000 little cardboard cubbyholes,

is how little it matters, now, what each

contained, whether I may have stuck my finger

into some of them to see what was coming,

how the dog ate one whole corner

and had to be made to vomit at the vet’s,

how I remember getting on a run of the good

stuff, once, a row with nothing but dark

chocolate over ganaches of peanut butter

and mocha and key lime, or that one winter

when just the thought of one more insipid

morsel made me cry. What I am noticing

this morning, more than the fact that every

remaining piece has lost its tempered shine,

the coating cracked and pale at the edges—

what I notice now are the long white rows,

the empty rows, straight and even as headstones

at Arlington, and how these days, when I choose

my sweet from the top left corner of the box,

where the remaining pieces huddle together

in the last, unshaken corner of the Etch-

a-Sketch, how I hold it in my mouth, let it melt

for as long as it takes, like the kid saving his last

piece of Halloween candy until Christmas day.

(first published in Arcturus, 2017)