We Keep Nothing

My mother has moments when she remembers
things that never happened
and she describes them with a specificity
that stills my heart.
She wanted to adopt a baby in 1963
but her in-laws wouldn’t let her and she knows a man
whose rabbit wears a silk scarf and he walks it along
the streets and I wonder if there is anything true
in these stories, an artifact, a spark, a single detail,
and I search for it, befuddled.
A star still shines though
it has died, its light carries
across the miles and the years,
that cold expanse between what is lost
and what we still can see.
I caught a firefly once
to show my daughter how easy
it was to trap it in my net.
I caught it between flashes
imagining where it might be and reaching
into the darkness. Sometimes faith suffices.
Sometimes faith is all we have.
We released it together,
my daughter and I. We opened
the net, and it found its way
out the way every living thing
knows how to be born.