October 15, 2019

I’m not looking at your wrinkles

When I gaze, lingeringly, into your face, or survey, with a cartographers’s sharp regard,
the topography of your hands, I’m not looking at your wrinkles. When my father
was dying, bags of sugar-water dangling uselessly above him, I watched him sleep,
traced telepathic patterns at the places where a blanket revealed a naked shoulder,
an elbow placid against a bed rail. He had stopped speaking those last days. 
When he woke, he met my eyes immediately, made an unmistakable squeeze of his fist,
passed a thumb back and forth over my knuckles. Maybe he was memorizing me, too - 
not my forehead with its deepening divot, not the blots on my skin the dermatologist
held a thick magnifier to, not the advancing, ruthless inevitability of decay, but the body
as it always was, holy. The body as it would always be, holy.