This is the handkerchief I might have waved as you
moved from the quay, the very cloth
that dried the happy places of us both 
after the asterisks of afternoons.
You have disintegrated, but this rag,
barely respectable in a public place,
stays, though not in the pocket of those days
when you were young and I was very young.
 
It's not a relic to me, but I guess
I'll never throw it out. Some other hands
clearing my house of all I now possess
will drop it in the black recycling bag.
Any remaining molecules of you