Poem for Thursday: "The End" - Elizabeth Alexander

The last thing of you is a doll, velveteen and spangle
silk douponi trousers, Ali Baba slippers that curl up at the toes,
tinsel moustache, a doll we had made in your image
for our wedding with one of me which you have.
They sat atop our coconut cake. We cut it
into snowy squares and fed each other, while God watched.

All other things are gone now: the letters boxed,
pajama-sized shirts bagged for Goodwill, odd utensils
famed to graduating students starting first apartments
(citrus zester, apple corer, rusting mandoline),
childhood pictures returned to your mother,
trinkets sorted real from fake and molten
to a single bar of gold, untruths parsed,
most things unsnarled, the rest let go

save the doll, which I find in a closet,
examine closely, then set into a hospitable tree
which I drive past daily for weeks and see it still there,
in the rain, in the wind, fading in the sun,
no one will take it, it will not blow away,

in the rain, in the wind,

it holds tight to its branch,

then one day, it is gone.