Alzheimer’s Unit
for Norma
Moments strung together because
we have linked them that way. One year
follows another. The quivering quail egg
releases a quail. Each memory a bead
on a necklace, a story we have told
ourselves over and over until it stays.
Then the beads scatter
across the floor, the mind unraveling
like a spool. See its tangled pattern—
a hand raised to say something it has
already forgotten. All the images bleeding
through so that time runs together, becomes a vast
blue lake, the barren blue of her gaze
as eyes shift and shift and hold onto nothing.
There are holes between thoughts,
a synapse like a vast chasm she jumps
into, never reaching the other side.
Spaces widen, swallow far and distant
stars, the brain thinning, diffusing
like an ever expanding universe,
more and more dark matter.
In a hospital room, I watch her snip
scissors through air at lengths
of hair that once dropped to the small
of her back. She plays notes on the broken
hammers of a piano, presses ghost songs
into the keys, burns up and down
these bonewhite hallways
searching for her own name.
-First appeared in North American Review, Spring 2004
