The Inevitable

And I can’t help thinking

Those tired, air-starved eyes

Will one day be my own

But that’s crazy—I cannot know that.

I could die tomorrow,
I could already be dead.

And they will never become your sad balls of liquid-
Watery, blue-rimmed…I thought they were brown.
Like my eyes, my mother’s eyes.

Well…whose eyes were those?

It's before my hour to ask, yet I wonder,
Yearn and want to know before your moments have passed: everything.

I am preparing for the worst,
For the letting go of a universe I once knew,
For a ripple effect tsunami coming to wipe out the safety of childhood memories.

How did you get through it, losing so much?
I’d hate to think you’d have to lose one more--
I almost want it to be your time, to take away your suffering.
Leave it with me, leave it with us.

I pray to God there’s such a thing as heaven,

Where your arms will be young, your knees will be un-gnarled,
And your insides…well they won’t matter anymore- the cancer will be gone.
Your white domed head will be covered with slicked-back dark hair,
Your proud forehead and imposing nose,
Smart on your face,
Dapper slacks, pocket watch, the way you looked in that picture
From fifty years ago, your arms around your first wife, my grandmother, the one I never knew, never saw, the one my mother lost so long ago, when she was still a child, the one I miss without reason.

I want to imagine you’ll embrace one another and cry for joy, for sadness, for a million different things you must’ve encountered when you lost a daughter together; for the daughter you lost without her, when I was just a child and my mother was motherless and sisterless in the face of the replacement you found, the one she never belonged in, the one I know and love, but would never be possible without …death.

The photographs cannot account for any of it.

That twinkle, the spark—life humor love—I was so afraid of it before
And now I see it as it is, pretenseless, at its end in this world, fissures of it gasping through your pores, dwindling at a close, preparing for the inevitable disengaging from the here and now-the world of beating hearts and eating diseases that war constantly without end.

So when everyone says things will be okay and you tell me you’re dying slowly, that everything’s a waiting game, I don’t know what to say to you, except that I will see you again, and that I love you.

I love you I love you I love you.

But I won’t tell you to hold on, to go on any longer than you can.

I will tell my children about you, I will keep you with me, and I will bid you goodbye as you leave your second wife, your children, your grandchildren, and know that when the turn is theirs, you will see them and they will see you, and the cycle will repeat:

And I will ask you all my questions, and you will give me all your answers.