Only a dollar at Goodwill, Italian a guess.
What a letdown, China stamped underside! 
Still, something new for the table, something old
perhaps from a woman who beat the odds
and, I like to think, kept sailing her sloop
on Biscayne Bay until one day
her ashes scattered in the mangroves,
her daughter wrapped up this vase in tissue.
Cream white with two painted green apples,
tall for a long stem rose.
A crack, a flaw,
water pools around my breakfast plate.
Doctors, can you explain
the damage to someone once lovely,
our silent aberration of cells?
Let Heaven make sense of it all.
Fetch the glue,
sliced apple with the scent
of a Tuscan orchard
that settles like dust on my skin.