Puzzle Pieces

My son holds my nose between his thumb and pointer finger, 
or rather, a cardboard piece bearing my nose’s image. He brings 
its bigness close to his own—button, the nurses called his
when he was born in the City of Brotherly Love. That nose,
cute as a button, a subtle slope he got from his Midwest-born father,
who gave him his flat feet and sharp temper, taught him to name 
wood by its scent and pattern—cedar, oak, balsa, locust—to count 
beer cans when they overflow the recycling bin, and to stop
reaching for me on the days we’re apart now that our time is split 
like the crab apple in front of the last house 
where his father and I shared a bed as husband and wife.
My son stares at the puzzle piece and squeezes, then looks down 
at the half-formed picture below, like a print in a darkroom 
whose traces are just coming into view. His father’s full, open mouth 
is laughing against the uncontainable green of summer grass, arms wide 
around his children and their mother, who is turned to look at him, her nose 
all the more prominent in profile, hair wild and Jewish as ever, the children
delighted at being there together, a family, and even though the mountain- 
blue sky and our chests and my right arm are mostly gaps showing the dark
mahogany of the table below, my son knows he has all the pieces he needs 
to fill in the clouds and our bodies. He places the misshapen square 
in the hole of my face—how easy to complete, to mend us, to turn 
what was missing into what is found. Perhaps this is why puzzles
never fit my hands—too many holes in my ancestral past, all those missing 
dead on what was once Soviet soil, limbs and names, pieces I knew 
I’d never find in the Ukrainian earth of my birthplace. My children inherited  
the patience for puzzles from their father, but the certainty 
that what we shatter with our own hands
can be put back together, that was never his to give.