Seated in gray swivel chairs sharing tea
with a friend beneath the industrial sterility
of corporate phosphorescence, she declares
that all consciousness is light
about which I agree but don’t want to admit
because it means that when in dying,
as my grandma shed the opaque fasteners
and began to gleam, I held fast
to the steal locker of my father’s pain.
He wondered how anyone could have
let his mother work as a foster grandparent
at a shelter serving abused children.
I wondered how she actually was
baking cookies for the residents.
I could only see her measuring,
watching the clock, waiting to smoke.
Sitting with her in that hour of afternoon
on the day she later died was like glimpsing
a hem of sheer fabric, trying to imagine
how it could have been worn.
I would like to have asked her to model,
if not to mend. It was not so much
a fire from within but as if something
had taken down the gauzy baffling
so that the light allowed a glimpse
before the shadows burned into my retinas
like negatives for the sun.