home w/o u

I put my room back together.
Dresser back in corner, back under
The pipe that coughed, leaked before
Sealing itself back up.

I remake my arrangement, too tentative
to call an altar: my grandmother's bracelet, grandfather's light meter,
my father's bicycle odometer. What am I doing here?
In this utterly random place, under this haunted pipe
Rearranging ancestral souvenirs?

I am paralyzed by choice, boyishly indignant
for the one I didn't get. Of all the worlds to land in
Who would honestly choose this one?