I thought it might hatch as long as I kept it warm enough
in a shoebox lined with a baby blanket, in the back of my closet,
under a lamp that I moved from my desk. Mostly, I knew
it wouldn’t work, but this was as much as I could do

in secret.

I didn’t want to tell my mother
because she would remove the possibility
gently (perhaps helping me bury the egg)
but with finality nonetheless.

There was no internet, remember, so
I would have had to consult the library card catalog:
egg hatching incubation robin—no.

This is not one of those stories where the egg bursts
with a sulphurous stink. In fact, what happened was

nothing.

We moved away, and I moved the egg,
entire and unbroken. Still.

The last place I saw it for sure was on top of my dresser
in the new house, which became the old house,
the last house in which I was ever a child.

My mother died and my father moved on, eventually,
renting a Dumpster and telling me over the phone
what he had thrown away each day in our driveway.

I packed what I could, one visit after another,
in my suitcase or purse, in boxes, in bins,
the last coming home with my husband
in a UHaul on icy roads—a folly.

I think the egg is somewhere. I remember packing it
again. But Columbus to Chicago, a four-bedroom house
to a two-bedroom condo: Things end up everywhere.
Things lose their preciousness.

You can’t save everything, you know.