This is a poem called After Image.
It's another one of the poems about my father's death.
I tried to see him.
And nothing complicated trying to see him.
I try to get his image in my head.
After image refers to that psychological phenomenon,
you look at crossed lines or something or other.
Close your eyes, you still see them.
That's what I mean by the title.
But I consciously, at one point, try to beckon a memory of him.
Just to visualize him.
That's all.
I wanted to look at it closely.
And that's what the poem is about.
I lay me down in the sunken eyes of my father float above.
A dry yellowish scale lodges at the corners of his mouth.
His skin so faded.
It glows pale from weeks in bed.
The modeling clear and brown.
He sips from the cup I hold.
A salt stain spreads on the pillow.
That gaze, which does not shift to include me
will not remain tonight as it has not three nights in a row.
His fingers go slack, and it's my pulse in my wrist.
His features slip the little white claw, the light
from the hall, clouds.
I am kissed dispassionately.
The pillow grazing my cheek as he did complacent a last time.
Tired again, he leaves me at the edge of dreams
to sleep where he has died.