Eight and a half year older
I towered over your bassinette
as I watched you,
the smallest at birth of my mother’s three girls,
the tallest after all.
As I scrutinized your eyes
from my lofty position
of eight and a half
I smugly thought you’d never catch up,
other outcomes beyond my eight and a half.
At eight and half
I tried to make you invisible.
But another prevailed
forty years later,
long after my first-born jealousy,
Olympian in the will of my imagination,
had finally spent its split-tongue elsewhere,
surely on younger siblings.
But no, my serpent was dead a sooner day,
a day I went to your bassinet
and saw those eyes were not the same:
As a new born your eyes were blue,
a dark and murky blue which
on that day I noticed they
had transformed to brown
fanned panic in me as I cried,
“Mommy, the baby’s eyes
are turning brown
there’s something very wrong!”
Comforted by her lesson in genetics
and the marriage of blue and brown
I softened to those eyes, so
understood by mother love.
And now I have been on this earth
nine years beyond you.
Your eyes from the coma
still stare into my memory of them
so opened wide
as the doctor shows me
how you cannot breathe without the respirator,
“I see”
and cuts off the dopamine
that allows what is left of your brain
to tell the heart keep pumping.
Your eyes still stare at me
as your husband,
curator of artful wishes,
says he is following your instructions
and sweeps clean the room
of all belongings,
leaving you to lie alone,
the blind whisper of nurse-hands
caring through the room
as though it were your armpits
and could hold you ’til you died.
We dutifully left
and now your eyes —
satirical, curious, wise —
watch our play and new playmates
but, no, they do not mind:
for these are the eyes of alchemy
the eyes that bring Psyche
to her palace in the sky.*
No one can make you invisible
to each who has loved you
and my eyes will be keeping you . . .
our brown-eyed girl.