Inventory of a Shed (original poem, 20 lines)

Jars of screws, sorted by a logic I never learned: / brass with brass, the bent ones kept, for what? / A calendar from the year my brother left, / still on June, the kelpie's photo curling at the corners.

The vice he taught me, badly, to use. / The bench with its map of burns and spills, / each one a Saturday I can almost name. / A radio that only takes the one station,

the one that reads the markets and the rain. / I switch it on. The wheat is down. The rain is coming / somewhere south of here, which it always was.

Here is the tin of nails he straightened, one by one, / the winter after the bank came out to look. / Here is the chair he would not let us fix.

I am meant to be deciding what to keep. / Instead I am standing where he stood, / holding a bent nail up to the light / as if there were a wall somewhere / that only this nail would go into, / and I was the one who knew where.

(Stanzas are separated above; a slash marks a line break.)