With a Veil and a Whisper

This compilation of drafts includes the original version of the poem, "Our Eyes," and each piece here can completely stand on its own. I don't really know how to separate them, as they're all so closely related. Perhaps they go together, or perhaps I can get suggestions on this front?

Written 1/24


I'm struck by the similarity of my granddad's eyes with those
of my late mother. I always knew I had inherited her sad eyes,
and that they came from her father. But now I'm more struck
by the vacant (not vacant - what's the word - searching?)
expression in his eyes that is reminiscent of her.  When I look into his eyes,
beneath the eyebrows,  I see my mother's eyes as she slowly retreated
into herself and expanded beyond herself as she slipped away.
Seeing through everything. But still that spark of silent joy
when recognition lights inside them.
He's sleeping now - and while I know he's not departing,
I can't help but feel the deja vu of sitting beside my mother as she slept.
My mother, who once spoke as he does now - not always coherent,
Often speaking to or from the past.
I often wonder if she's talking to him now.
Regardless of my feelings or beliefs of what follows death,
there is a veil and a conversation, or a veil and a whisper,
between what comes at the end, and what comes after.
Or, perhaps, the whisper only exists here, in these words,
where I connect the future and the past through the tentative, fragile present
- which is always slipping, slipping, slipping away.

*

Sometimes I imagine it's to me
She will speak, when everyone's left,
and I'm alone in the spaces she used to occupy.
As soon as silence falls, once everyone has left,
I'll hear her voice call softly from her room and
I'll find her, sitting in her chair, propped up
in bed, or standing by the window
gazing out - like some obscene hologram
I've conjured out of my memory, overlapping
the mental spaces she survives
with the physical spaces
in which I am still living.

*

There's a photo on my grandmother's wall.
My grandfather, triumphantly raising a deer
to be skinned and cleaned, stands to the side
wearing a bright orange knit cap pushed back
on his head. I can only stare,
as I see my mother there. The way she
wore her knit-cap as she was balding.
The sad eyes she inherited from her father.
The same lines on her face, the same droop in her cheeks.

I know that you inherited his face,
Those sad eyes, the droop in your cheeks, the lines
on your face, but even though you came later,
You left sooner, and now you are being
born again, coming after him once more,
As I see you now in the vacant,
searching expression,
And I realize how connected we all always were -
that even though you left, you were always
creeping back into him, day by day,
holding his hand as he weakens,
eventually, in days or months or years to come,
guiding him with you into the enfolding beyond.