I.

Hearts’ breath cast in porcelain,
Hans and Katrina stopped in
the middle of their country dance.

They closed their eyes for 59 years
on hand-stained coffee tables, oak
hi-fi cabinets, walnut dressers into

Their space — my parents’ shared life.
Hans’ glossy white head tilted under
a jaunty peasant’s cap, white jacket,

Baggy striped blue pants, and wooden
shoes, the color of hay, his large hands
hidden, empty under his elbows. He laid

Down his tools before dancing with Katrina,
the edges of white bonnet pointed blue
flowers skyward. Smooth camel-colored

Hair hiding her delicate ears. Her lively
eyes turned downward towards the dark
tulips on her skirt. Her one possession,

An opening for flowers in Katrina’s
starched apron — all hollow
inside her narrow waist.

II.

In my early years, Hans and Katrina stood still
on the second level of my parents’ two-tiered
end table. Pulling myself up from the shaggy

Grey rug to see them. I learned not to touch,
stroke, lick their shiny cold surfaces. Later,
growing, understanding things Mother

Treasured. The first year of World War II,
She snapped up Hans and Katrina;
two figurines kept losing their heads.

My mom sighed, then repaired with
yellow glue. My fingers tracing tracks.
They moved every time we did.

Cherishing their decorative, cheerful,
silent veneer, their polished exterior,
noticing their mouths—merely dots.

Years later, Mom and I counted the
homes we’d lived in with Hans and
Katrina. Sixteen!

III.

In her cactus garden, Mom walked me
down a meandering path she laid from
shards of terra cotta, broken pots.

Remembering the nightshirts Mom
made from my father’s dress shirts,
I could see bordered in pink, blue,
zigzag trim along the neckline,
under arms, around shirttails.

I recalled dresses sewed from wide swirling
skirts cast-off from my aunts’ Sunday frocks.
Mom broke silence in the garden, asking what

I wanted to keep once she was gone.
What lasts? My lips twitched,
Hans and Katrina.

IV.

I wanted to hurl those figurines across time —
and America all the way to Guthrie, Oklahoma,
shattering the two against the bronze marker

Still alive near the grave of Adelia Hofstader. I
never did though. I thought of great-grandmother,
Crazy Addie, they called her, a real woman,

Coming as a girl from Holland to Galveston, Texas.
At 15, she spent the night clinging to a palm tree
during the hurricane, lived when her family died,

Made crazy quilts, was taken aboard an orphan
ship to Mexico, taught children to read, married
a Scotsman, bore son Robert, daughter Dencie,

My Grandma who grew up on the farm in Kansas,
studied math, married a preacher, moved every
Two years, lost her first baby to unsterile scalpels
in a hospital in Boston.

She bore the next four children on the kitchen table.
Ruth was her daughter, my mother, the third child,
renowned for broad shoulders.

Dencie called Ruth “my little peacemaker.”
Ruth did what was expected, made the best grades,
promised a college education out east, ran against

The Great Depression, graduated valedictorian at
Oklahoma University, her father being president,

Worked at bookstores, floral shops, engaged on the
eve of Pearl Harbor, married January 30th, 1942 in

Seven yards of white taffeta, sewn by her sister,
Mary Lee, following my father, an air force cadet,
up, down the west coast, working in peach canneries,
scarred her ladylike hands. Ruth who bore me,

Patria: the name means fatherland. The name came
from a woman my mom met in the great war, a woman
with a beautiful smile— my namesake— Patria Thorn.

V.

A terrible stillness has overcome me. As if your beloved
things, mom, grandma, great-grandma, are lost.

I am stranded here far away from your rushes and rivers.
I escaped your prairie land, to find California with its tech

Wizards and wildfires, with its redwoods and calm blue ocean.
I rejected all but a few of the world of your things

Behind. And I am lonely. Our offsprings are beginning to
desire to hold the beloved things of the ancestors.

Hear me grandmothers. I am the blossom in your apron,

the dance at the edge of your love.

We are learning to care for things that last over time.