Resting Face

by Carl Little

I don’t follow unless you mean
Auntie in casket, wearing
glasses she never wore alive
disturbing a perfectly fine
wizened visage and eyes
that shone even when you
commented on the weather.

Once a deer leapt
through Auntie’s windshield —
she survived.
Another time she took a bite
of mom’s shepherd’s pie
hot from oven
and went face down in her plate —
We thought she’d died,

but she lived a lot longer,
until 1979, age 89,
interred at Oak Grove Cemetery
after the viewing
where those glasses
caught me off guard,
thinking how useless they’d be
where Auntie and all of us
were headed.