As a child I was constantly sticking my fingers in sockets
and trying to figure out if grief had its own color
so my mother sat me down on the sofa and took out the Pantone book,
paged through it for an hour until we found the blues.
There, I said, that one, and pointed to cerulean.
Oh honey, my mother replied, That’s not grief. That’s just a paint swatch
and it will never amount to all the pain in your heart.
Sometimes I feel the urge to go wade out into the lake
after filling my pockets with stones,
but then I remember my father and how he wore his grief
like a too-tight sweater, something given to an awkward child
by a grandmother who doesn’t even know the right size,
so I take the stones back out of my pockets
and I place them on his grave instead.