her face

For Sylvie Pont, September 1909 – June 2008

I’m not sure what death is.
But today when my mother’s message was left
- she’d said twenty minutes ago, and by then
it was later still – I thought of what it wasn’t.

It is specifically when something
is no longer there. Because what you notice
is that there’s nothing to be noticed.
What was noticeable is gone.

Her face came to me last night, that face
she had on her in those last days
as I entered her nursing home room
and she brought me, delayed, into view.

Completely guileless, no longer
hiding or dissembling. She smiled
into the wide but narrowing space between us
as if it were God itself and safer, even.

That thing that life might be, that thing
that was in the body, and since midday
no longer is, the space. The gap we are.
It closed in her. Nothing more to notice,

nothing but a possibility closed, once
closing. I see it like a smooth aperture
of a camera image swivelling shut.
The body loosing its snip of Nothingness.

My dad’s voice was only a little normal,
mostly it was full of water, and cloud.
Grey sky speaking into the receiver
in a big house alone. Dear orphan man.

Her pin-cushion chin, no teeth. I think
of her journals now and my novel
that she will never read. It would have
made her sad. So there was no need.

I tell you now about touching the cat
in an ever-getting-softer way,
about how, if we get let it, skin can
feel more everything. Violin string

back of blackest, mirror fur.
When I run the lightest hand
the length of the pelty spine,
it ripples and crinkle-creeps.

And the alien face pops its
pink tongue out a little peep
just, and crimps its eyes.
Sitting, we are deep strangers together.

Her face. Her dying child’s-face.
Swallowing the air towards me.
All that simple gladness for being-with
taking ninety-eight years (and some) to fruit.

I try to be swifter. To know every glimpse
of your neck and the wiley hair at the nape
is not forever, what I have is paper, breath, petals,
condensation, fog, motes and dew.

Her face. And soft, soft rain in my ribs,
all of it running down and collecting
in the basin dark of me a broad pool –
reservoir of thankful, fragile space. Oh.