Forma Negata

Mother's silver eyes— 
no, that's not right.
Her eyes at the end, how they
I want to say reflected but that makes them 
mirrors, makes them about something other than 
what they were: open
and not seeing, or seeing 
past where I could follow.
Expression without emotion is dead, I wrote once, thinking I understood.
But when I tried to hold her hand
my hand went through to the rail beneath
or my hand held bone wrapped in cooling skin 
or there was no hand, mine or hers,
only the fact of hands being 
a thing we'd agreed upon.
The syntax breaks here. 
What I mean is—
You were there, mother, 
and then the room was 
more there than you were.

Air filled the space your breathing left. 
I counted: one, two, three—
not her breaths, my own, 
which continued, inexplicably.
The form the poem wants: mother died, silver eyes, darkness, stars.
The form it gets: me, sitting, counting my breathing, wondering when to call the nurse. 
No—
that's still trying to say it. 
Let me—
Her wrist, the delicate bones I could see 
beneath skin that had become 
transparent, nearly
Emotion without expression dies.
I am trying to write my way to the moment 
when I understood
that grief is not in the heart 
but in the hand, reaching,
finding cloth instead of warmth, 
metaphor instead of mother.
Each word I place 
No.
Each word

watching my hand write each word
and the word word becoming
a sound I've said too many times,
word word word, 
until it empties.
This is what I'm after:
the emptying.
Not the grand statement about Language, 
but the small erosion—
how mother starts meaning less 
the more I write it,
how her name, which I won't give you, 
has become a shape my mouth makes 
without her in it.
You want the poem to arrive somewhere. 
I did too.
But mother died
and then my mouth made sounds 
to tell the nurse
and then I drove home counting 
streetlights, one, two, three— 
and when I tried to write it

my hand moved and the pen moved and 
words appeared and none of them
were her.
The form it refuses:
revelation, closure,
the satisfying click of meaning 
locking into place.
What it offers:
this gesture, this reaching—
my hand still moving across the page 
toward something
that isn't there,
has never been there, mother,
the space between letters 
where you