I Looked at You While You Slept

I Looked at You While You Slept
                            for my Mum

You were asleep.  You were always asleep and I needed something

to do and I knew, because you had decided, I’d never see

you after this, not your face or your hair, not your mouth or

your hands—

They’d made you comfortable.  They’d curled you fetal, in

a way that made you lean into me, and your eye lids
were heavy winter coats, too big for you, but it was

cold in the room

while the wait in your face drained away, blush pulling back

the way watercolor cakes do, after water.  Once thick, but then,

when spread…I wasn't leaving I couldn't leave you couldn't

make me this time

so I inked you, before your going away, I inked you in

my notebook in my hand.  Your unwashed but combed

back smooth (thank you whomever nurse) hair.  Lips

split wide

(thank you intubator) and your long nose, but I never knew how

long until this, and each crease in your skin—and in the nearly two

years since I’d seen you you were no grayer—but you should

have been

because even though you were not you needed to be an old woman,

you’d lived an old woman’s life.  Those chipped nails, brown as always, 

trapped potting soil.  At least that’s how I drew them.  I needed
to.  And your mouth—

We’d taken your breath away.  In short puffs you were getting past me

like pieces of a ghost, past my cheek when I was close enough, and I was

always close.  While you slept, while you died,  I drew you into

my notebook

and kept you in my back pocket and sat on you for weeks after.  
It’s rough.  It’s nothing like you.  It’s exactly the way you were.