Gazing at You, Winona

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Shrunken face, brown, small;
who reduced you to this diminutive size?
When did you become a brown rabbit?
You scare me. You make my days unsteady as a winter leaf.
I wish there was more of you again.
If I hold you, please do not fold like a paper doll.

  I look at your framed pictures on the TV, black and white youth,
then I look at you now.
The years are criminal, larcenous. They steal so much;
the years hate our flesh,
but the heart is human, it must add so much.

I add. And I add.
I put your former face before my eyes, unwittingly,
almost every time.

Should I glory in your sagging eyes,
simply because they are still here?

     Should I yearn for the mommy of the grainy photos?
     the one who carries the burden of a freshly created boy
     in her arms like there is no weight to it?

I am the magician of our later lives,
practicing the magic of old and new images,
jostling them like an tentative circus act.


© Lamont Palmer

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