Memento

[TranquillityBase]

Memento

I was with him when he found it Consider a rewrite like this: "I was with him when he found the skull...". I feel like "finding a skull" would create more intrigue than "finding it" in the first line and it gives the reader something concrete to work with right away.  this may be doable, think it would be good to have skull in l.1
discarded among cedar and limestone,
the skull of an 8-point buck 
now plated with chips from a shattered mirror,
a memento of my son’s painstaking labor
breaking the mirror, selecting the chips,
affixing them, patient and compelled. for some reason my mind read "composed" instead of compelled, but i feel like the N was trying to describe the son as "patient and driven". Maybe you might wanna switch this word out for another? Very minor nit  he had to contend with a lot at a young age, and that translated into a compulsive nature, in good and bad ways...anyway "compelled" is an essential word for me.

I look into the skull’s mirror, suggestion: rewrite as silvered skull? but that may mean you have to change S3L2 around to avoid repetition. Or you can cut "mirror"entirely from this line since the memento is already described in the first stanza.
meditate on the chaos of my visage chaos feels a little vague here. what is chaotic about the N's visage?
reflected back in a kaleidoscope of loss.   I hoped it would be clear, but since the mirror chips are all at different angles, what you see when you look into it resembles a Picasso painting, with your nose where your eye should be, etc.

What did he see in its reflection, 
this curiosity of bone and silvered glass?
Could he see into an indifferent universe Would you consider switching out "an" for "this"? It would make it so that you don't have to say "It's a universe we share." in the last stanza   think I want to keep "It's a unverse we share"
where his future would be denied? Love the phrasing here

It’s a universe we share. He is father to my grief
and I am father to his memory
that time has fused into the happenstance of now. This last stanza doesn't feel like it's saying anything the poem hasn't said already. I do find the phrasing "he is father to my grief" interesting bc of the sort of role reversal caused by the son's death, but interesting is all it is to me.

Interesting what you say about the last stanza.  Maybe you have to be a father (but maybe you are).  I do worry about the last line.

Thank you for sharing,

Alex

Thanks for the read and critique, a few reponses above.

Tim