Souvenir

What else fashioned from earth survives?

Bone white; fired terracotta;

trickster raven black with turquoise eyes.

The geometric autograph of pueblo.

I can read some of those angles

in the palm of my hand: there in clay

and here in the palest nectarine flesh

of my broken-in child hands

—hands that chose the modest bowl

for a gift. The bowl’s turquoise eyes

alert to passage, unblinking as they are sunk

into a cardboard box. Paid in cash.

—Bought from hand that once closed

around its clay, moist, as if in prayer;

later wrapped it as roughly

as any piece of broken earth.