Here's a reverent moment for the man today. 
A man who had a place for everything, 
literally everything.
Who never 86ed a thing in his 85 year-long life.
Never gave up on nothing. And nobody.

I still haven't figured out the key
But maybe my difficulty could be that
There never was a key.
But if there was, it's escaped me.

I found the bits to that beautiful drill brace
Not near by, but in another room
Inside that heavy green tool box,
wrapped in a bit of old shirt fabric,
well-disguised. 
Finding them was just a simple matter
of having sorted through everything there
and remembering exactly where
I'd seen what I was looking for before.

I found a partially petrified squirrel in the driveway there this week.
Black and leathery, with little hand-like feet bones protruding.
No fur, no fuzzy tail.
Either a squirrel or a small bat-like demon. 
Dreaming headless in the leaves.

I also found a walnut,
one perhaps left by that same demon squirrel
who died trying to retrieve it
from that dusty, too-secure sanctuary. 
Or, more probably, just forgot
where he'd stashed it.
That would explain why that walnut sat
unmolested for decades on that shelf.

I'd thought many times,
passing it through the years,
that the squirrel had out-smarted himself,
finding the perfect storage spot,
neglecting retrieval. 

But now I think there's something there,
perhaps in the water,
in the well-spring silently seeping beneath the place,
That sticks stuff there.
 The past has needed chiseling out of there
And the present remains awfully thick.
After sorting through every god-damned walnut
I'm sure and likely to kick another one 
out from the baseboard today, 
or in yet another impossibly over-looked cupboard,
stashed rather than trashed,
a cache of the past eternal.

How would you organize the place,
Other than how it just naturally 
seemed to organize itself? 
With fruit in the fruit room, sure,
But also Chlordane and curtain rods in there too.
And paint.
And simple repetition would eventually seize the fate.
With a certain place for everything
and each thing in that place.
A store ignoring organization
in favor of routine
Where every thing would have a place
 but no one knew the scheme.

And here was a man who made his living
sorting like with kind,
little cards into Coke case chords,
memory versus time.
Who's home was a game of Husker Du,
As if organized by a squirrel's brain,
Walnuts remembered from year to year
But rarely retrieved again. 

Who but us, who were born to this,
could possibly unwind
the tentacles tightly tethering
all those ties that bind?
Some days I feel like the prince
chopping Rose Red free
lip-deep in a thick thorn patch
that's out to puncture me.
Other times I'm almost eight
rediscovering mine
or yours or theirs or ours still there
from another time.
What am I to make of this?
Or do with this? Or do without?
The archive pile possesses far too many
pictures from the past
Still unlabeled, precious, specious,
Certain to outlast
The stories recalling who was whom
and what was certainly what.
Was that your grandmother's brother's wife
Or your grandpa's maiden aunt?

"We used to drive over to Bend back then
to visit Ed's brother there.
I remember that one of the daughters was Emily,
She's still alive somewhere."
The pencils didn't come to attention
when the old man would hold forth,
His memories were semi-unreliable
sharing stories more than truth.
We are a part of that mythos now
Each true to our roles
Weavers raveling, knotting, nattering
worried to our souls.
Unworthy, unable, incapable of
remembering what they entrusted to us.
Dusty, trending toward more dust,
Ashes to ashes, eighty-six the fuss.