Shrunken face: brown, refined and small. <br />Who reduced you to this diminutive size? <br />When did you become fragility's core? <br />You scare me. My days tremble like a cold leaf. <br />I wish there was more of you again. <br />When I hold you, please do not fold like a paper doll. <br /> <br /> <br />Photos on the TV demonstrate grief, crossed with <br />the hours of the young and hours of lean hands. <br />I look at you as you are in the uncertain present: <br />the years are criminal, larcenous. They steal so much; <br />the years hate flesh, hate the beauty of skin, <br />but the heart is human, it must add so much, <br />it must increase day to day subtraction. <br />It is a math of survival. The hours of numbers. <br /> <br />So I add. And I add. <br />I put your former face before my eyes, unwittingly, <br />every time there is sun in this final house. <br />Should I glory in your weakened eyes, <br />because they are still here and still watchful? <br />Should I yearn for the mother of the grainy photos? <br />the one who carried the fullness of a boy <br />in her arms, like there was no weight to him? <br />Direction is like a man who is drunk, <br />stumbling from town to town, from mind to mind, <br />from platitude to platitude over kitchen tables. <br /> <br />I rest in beauty because of the years <br />and beyond the years; years that terrorize <br />knowledge that is dormant but clear. <br /> <br />In the faces which sometimes make us regret, <br />comes the shape of beauty, of a trinket <br />destined to live, in spite of a quiet albatross. <br /> <br />Mother, we are the magicians of our later lives, <br />practicing the magic of old and new eyes, <br />jostling days like tentative circus acts.<br /><br />Lamont Palmer<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/gazing-at-you-winona-palmer-my-mother/
