I.

During the Great Depression, clapboard shacks of subsistence sharecroppers and tenant farmers on the Mississippi delta crowded together on farmland. Farmers worked long hours planting on poor soil. Their children, often in large families, played with marbles, affordable toys. Today, tilling churns to the surface dozens of marbles. Collectors comb this land they call glass graveyards – for marbles that pop up every spring. One man who hunted arrowheads there as a child now brings his grandchildren to recover marbles. A search for the shine and color of history.

 II.
 
I swore I’d never write a-lost-all-her-marbles poem,
the slang of cruel ache-fear. 
 
Ann tells me her mother’s story, a retired physician
at eighty-eight in an Alzheimer’s care facility, watched
 
around the clock. I ask if she sees her mother often. 
No. She talks to nurses many times a week.
 
Visits upset her mother who accepts routine
faces coming frequently to help her,
 
until Ann walks in. Then her mother screams
for help. She cannot cope with strangers. 
 
 
 III.
 
My favorite shooter marble disappeared, dark blue
with four white stars and a yellow moon inside.
Round things roll. 
 
You may find it when I go west. 
Under a couch. Coated in dust.
Inside a heat vent. 
 
Store it in your tin matchbox
or in that desk drawer where you stashed
a chain of paper clips you made one lazy day.
 
Consider it a keepsie –
or bury it below garden Buddha
for a hunter to find.