Memento

[alonso ramoran]

I think you're very close to landing on an untouchable draft, but I believe the last line needs work still. As you have it, "reflections" feels forced in and the stanza doesn't flow as well as it did in the previous drafts imo. If I may be so bold as to suggest something like the following:

It’s a universe we share. He is father to my grief
and I am father to his memory---
tens of placed reflections fused
by the happenstance of now.

Memento

I was with him when he found it
discarded among cedar and limestone,
the skull of an 8-point buck that he 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.

In this curiosity of bone and silvered glass,
could he see into an indifferent universe 
where his future would be denied?

I look into the skull’s mirror,
meditate on the chaos of my visage
reflected back in a kaleidoscope of loss. I don't understand why this stanza and the previous stanza were flipped. Beginning the next stanza with "It's a universe we share" sounds a little awkward because it sounds like it's continuing a thought, which it was. That thought is broken up in this draft though, and without any immediately noticeable artistic intent. Even if the intent were there, I feel like it would just be overcomplicating the poem. To me, the sequence of the N looking at this piece of art that his son left behind and then trying to understand the thoughts and feelings involved in his son's creative process makes perfect sense. Also, I think the line "where his future..." hits harder when these stanzas are flipped, b/c I don't think it's said as explicitly that the son has passed already until this line.

It’s a universe we share. He is father to my grief
and I am father to his memory.
Reflections fused by the happenstance of now.