My mother and I are
knee-deep in my
late father's storage
unit, which is filled
to the joists with
old math textbooks.

I scrape away the dust,
strange names emerge:
   numerical analysis,
      combinatorics,
         steganography,
             astrophysics,
                 number theory.

We don't understand
even a single page,
we decide it feels
fine to donate them,
the entire collection -
how many years did
we watch these books
decay on his shelves?
If there was a favorite,
he never told us.

Yet what a surreal act,
to thread steps into
this aluminum room
filled with the very
last of his things,
& collect these
books that I often
thought were almost
holy, filled with the
sigmas and matrices
of his high religion,
& now they're just
dust and weight,
                             dust and weight.