I miss you
and memory of you, it’s not as clear
as it used to be
I try to trace your voice in ink,
knowing it's impossible,
I'm still trying to see your phantom blue eyes,
but to no avail
I try to hear you but all I hear is static
coming across the ocean

Your last words to me were jumbled
uttered through a jaw left paralyzed by your stroke
and after your death
I was left to sift through the ruins of what you told me (I'll never know)
Trying in vain to decipher the hieroglyphics
of the way your hand squeezed mine
for the last time

I didn't deem myself strong enough to attend the funeral
I knew I was too shaky
to deal with estranged relatives and a cortege of black
and a symphony of muffled familial sadness
The pews full of faces chiseled from marble,
listening as a stranger gave your eulogy
I was too weak to handle witnessing
the birth of a stately widow
in the midst of an ugly cemetery
          (I always imagine how bitterly it would cost her,
       to prostrate herself in submission at your grave
     kneeling like the defeated queen
    of a fallen empire)
I did not want to see the way that what one fears,
the end
can come so abruptly
and I was selfish
I chose not to say goodbye
because I could not stand the thought of
seeing you in a quiet boneyard
amongst cold, silent stones

But maybe I should've gone
because now I know that
when you mourn
you mourn
alone

There was hardly time to be sorry
with homework and house-keeping responsibilities
now that my mother was gone
I had to do my crying
while cooking dinner or doing math exercices
Any sorrow had to be wedged
between stress and duty
all permission to grieve
was impeded, absorbed by the impassive process

It truly is terrible, the knowledge that
it could all end, it is all capable
of devastation
Every plant can wither
everything can ******* or fade
All, all
can be lost
every memory can fade through time
or will to remember

My family never mourned together,
the family in America I mean
and I believe that this is how
in each of us began
a deep isolation, though we never spoke of this,
of the absence of touch

The worst of death,
the lose of a beloved
is the separation.
I am alive. You are not.
It is terrible to survive
as unmerited consciousness

The memories I have of you
are far too few
and I will forever be left wishing
I had done more, said more, taken more pictures
The remembrance is insatiate

Sometimes I like to read the books you left behind,
and remember your passion for Latin,
the way the citations
unfurled as you gave them new meanings.
But on other days,
I keep them far and untouched
-they seem too much like tombstones
that have surrendered their worth
to your absence

Your death is yet another
ghost posed on my lips and in my thoughts:
Never
In this world, this circular reality
things can happen conclusively, decisively,
and the mind cannot reverse them:
*Never