The Gift Of The Empty Hand (edit #3)

[Akira]

There's so much feedback, I almost afraid to comment, so I will keep to a few quick points:

You left without your things.

Eighty years of salvage shelved 
beside Cayce, Twain and Eliot;
issues from the weekly deluge 
of Archeology, New Yorker, Science   [Archeology, Science, New Yorker,] vocalizes a bit smoother
and annotated testaments 
the rest of us would never read.
Closets harbor picnic baskets     With "deluge" above I see you are going for the water motif, but I really stumbled on "Closets harbor"; if there was a stanza break it might work better.
and rescued vacuum cleaners;
Polaroid cameras in their striped boxes;
photos of your youth, and ours.

When the ocean took it all
your grin appeared and whispered: [appeared, whispering:]
They're just things.      [even though it is admittedly so far away, I wonder about the repetition with line 1 of the word "things"]

My arms are full of empty,
free to hold today.

You seem to be (nicely) comparing the reaction of him/her with the reaction of [narrator] you. Is the idea that the gathering/accumulation was done of one mind, but the loss revealed the divergence? I am also bothered by the opening seeming to refer to the end of the relationship, but the loss of stuff caused by (seemingly) a random weather event. Is it some big coincidence? Or am I miss reading this?

There may be more to mine there.