A jigsaw puzzle lies on a family table, and nobody in the room is really talking about the puzzle. Mary F. C. Pratt never says outright what is happening, but the clues add up. One daughter is "still and squeezed dry, / close to completion," and she "smiles from far away when someone speaks." Judging by these lines, she is dying and her family has gathered around her. The central idea is that grief has no single method. Each person attacks the loss in their own way, and none of them can make the picture come out whole.
The poem's cleverness is that each person's way of doing the puzzle stands for their way of facing death. The mother works "section by section," and her list slides from image to memory: "the white cat's paws / the green butterfly, / the day her youngest daughter was born." The last item isn't something you could find on a puzzle piece at all. The brother is a matcher: "He finds its twin in the picture on the box. / He places it exactly where it belongs." Those three flat, orderly sentences describe a mind that trusts the system. Then the system fails: "And his twin sister, / where does / she go?" The line breaks split the question in two. Where does she fit, and where does she go when she dies? The word "twin" works hard here. Everything else has a match on the box, and she, the poem suggests, has no match left.
The middle sister's strategy is control: "Make the frame; the rest will fit in." The semicolon makes the advice sound tidy and confident, like a rule from a puzzle guide. The brother-in-law's stanza falls apart in short, stumbling lines: "The pieces / we need are / missing. Someone / has a piece in / her pocket." Enjambment cuts each phrase off before it can settle, and the sentence limps along like someone too angry to speak smoothly. He wants a culprit, a thief with a pocket. His anger is a way of refusing to accept that nobody took anything. The corners he mentions are what a frame depends on, so the sister's plan collapses with his accusation.
The father's moment is the poem's turning point. "He is in no section; no border can hold him" echoes the earlier talk of frames and sections, then drops it. The next line uses the same verb in a new sense: "He can only hold his daughter's hand." Borders hold pieces in place, but a hand holds a person. His sentence is the plainest in the poem, and it is the only action that answers the situation rather than avoiding it.
The speaker, who comes last and says "I" only at the end, sorts pieces "into small piles." This is waiting, not solving. The ending widens outward, from "this table" to "here at all," and the puzzle becomes "this hardest of works." That phrase turns grief into labour. Look back at the first line, "One thousand pieces." It gives a countable, finite task, the kind a box can promise. The poem closes on "infinite pieces of time," which cannot be counted or finished and which no box describes.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular rhythm. It is free verse in plain, spoken language. Its structure is a catalogue that moves around the table, each member introduced by "My mother," "My brother," "My father," so the reader seems to circle the family. Stanza shapes mirror personality: the brother's neat parallel sentences against the brother-in-law's shattered ones.
The poem matters because it sustains a single metaphor without ever explaining it or promising comfort. The puzzle never gets solved. What the poem offers instead is a quiet recognition that when the picture can't be completed, holding a hand is a kind of answer.