Alzeimer's

 

Unknown

 Alzeimer's

Chairs move by themselves, and books.

Grandchildren visit, stand

new and nameless, their faces' puzzles

missing pieces. She's like a fish

in deep ocean, its body made of light.

She floats through rooms, through

my eyes, an old woman bereft

of chronicle, the parable of her life.

And though she's almost a child

there's still blood between us:

I passed through her to arrive.

So I protect her from knives,

stairs, from the street that calls

as rivers do, a summons to walk away,

to follow. And dress her,

demonstrate how buttons work,

when she sometimes looks up

and says my name, the sound arriving

like the trill of a bird so rare

it's rumored no longer to exist.

 

Bob Hicok

 

My mother too. 

It's her focus - one    thing    at    a    time. 

And her time travelling. Sometimes a child, waiting for her father to take her home, other times locked in the present, reading aloud as if tasting every word singly. I wonder as I listen if space on the page for her is different - each word an island, her eyes swimming the distance between.

She shifts from knowing us to wondering at the audacity of these strangers who think they can tell her what to do and where to go. Who are we? What place is this where people put things in front of you and expect you to to eat them when they say so? Who are you to brush her hair or cut her nails - who asked you? Why are you so pushy? Why do you want all these things?

And her plate becomes a map. Colours and textures, like forests or deserts, she picks at them gingerly, not sure of the consequences. Does this belong here? Should she move it to the West? Will there be war if mixed, this mountain and that mass? How should she manage this chaos?

Meantime, we watch her like a mystery. She has made us detectives. Which way is the wind blowing?  Where and who is she now? Am I a friend or an enemy? Every moment she changes and she changes us. We struggle to keep up or slow down. Now repeating the moment over and over (she reads the same sentence 20 times - will she move to the next one this time?), now sliding into different worlds (Where's the dog? We have no dog, but she looks for it. Did we forget to feed it?), or ascribing vile motives to our innocent attempts to help. It shocks us. What will she make of us next?

Is it sad? Yes. She is not accessible in the old ways. I wish I could ask my own dear mother - "Do you remember..?" or question her about details of our lives together that I didn't know I would need to know. It's strange, to have her and not have her. 

And no. 

Something draws me in.

Loving her isn't hard, just bewildering.

It's loving without knowing, without understanding - a blind love.

Like a seed-sprout pushing up through the black,

reaching for an unseen sun.

 

 

 

Introductions

Balthasar van der Ast

Introductions

Some of what we love

we stumble upon—

a purse of gold thrown on the road,

a poem, a friend, a great song.

And more

discloses itself to us—

a well among green hazels,

a nut thicket—

when we are worn out searching

for something quite different.

And more

comes to us, carried

as carefully

as a bright cup of water,

as new bread.

Moya Cannon

How many of the things we love have been stumbled upon, run into, or been shown us by a friend? How many times while walking have we come around a bend to a view so unexpectedly gorgeous - a tree with leaves on fire or a corner pocket of woods crowded with Queen Anne's Lace? What about the day Mung Bean and I were talking in the schoolyard and happened to look up at what I've never seen before or since - a rainbow ring around the sun?

 

So many beautiful things have found me.

 

The cobalt feather of a Stellar Jay, a Golden Cowrie shell, a piece of worm-eaten wood that looks like a miniature landscape - that's not even getting into the books that have jumped at me, or the poems, or how a painting gripped me by the neck as my eye ran over a wall...

 

Hello, gifts.

 

Glad to meet you.

 

Fog

 

 

Dale Lockwood

 

Fog

          A vagueness comes over everything,

as though proving color and contour

alike dispensible: the lighthouse

extinct, the islands' spruce-tips

drunk up like milk in the

universal emulsion; houses

reverting into the lost 

and forgotten; granite

subsumed, a rumor

in a mumble of ocean. 

                                         Tactile

definition, however, has not been

totally banished: hanging 

tassel by tassel, panicled

foxtail and needlegrass,

dropseed, furred hawkweed,

and last season's rose-hips

are vested in silenced

chimes of the finest,

clearest sea-crystal.

                                      Opacity

opens up rooms, a showcase

for the hueless moonflower

corolla, as Georgia

O'Keefe might have seen it,

of foghorns; the nodding

campanula of bell buoys;

the ticking, linear

filigree of bird voices.

 

Amy Clampitt

 

So many times the only response to a poem I can make 

is to be quiet and read it over again.

 

Clampitt is masterful at description -

 I have nothing to say that adds to her work.

She has done it all so beautifully that I see and recognize

each detail.

 

She makes it sound obvious, simple.

It is anything but.

 

 

Ice Wager

Johannes Franciscus Hoppenbrouwers

 The Ice Wager

Snowscape. Shod in tailor’s irons,
Red-hot, with my poundage of weights,
I test the ice of our latest year.
Half the world is out on skates

And the other half watches. Avercamp
Or Brueghel bring the wild duck
Out of the skies, and crowd the river
With yellow leggings, anoraks,

Tobogganing children, and those dogs
More loved around here than people—
The blind or the lonely. Winter trees
Turn gelid in the freezing fog,

The roads are churned to slushy meal
By the horses. Zigzags, figures of eight
Complete the picture. But it is real,
Our wager, so place your bet

With the notary on the bank,
Impartial witness. Hollow rumblings
Out on the ice—the iron quoits,
The games in progress. Will it crumble, 

Our little world, or will it hold?
Upriver from the Netherlands’
Oceangoing space, a man skates in,
A traveller, his clasped hands

Behind his back, his earflaps
Dangling. Has it fallen through,
Our worldview? But he brings no news.
Our mulled wine, our potato schnapps

Are all that concern him. Hurdy-gurdies,
Monkey dances. The Good, the True
Are beyond him, where he is travelling to.
It is down, again, to me and you,

Tonight, when I come off the ice
Which, needless to say, has never cracked
In centuries of changing skies,
To carry out the mandatory acts,

Traditional, for the time of year—
Banquets where the loser pays,
White tablecloths for the ice-floes
Junketing on, in hope and fear.

Harry Clifton 

The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 

 

Has the ice cracked? 

Has our worldview collapsed? 

Will our little world crumble?

I love the questions. Are we ready to make a wager on our answers?

 

 

The Transfiguration

Morgan Weistling

The Transfiguration

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.

We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The Shepherds’ hovels shone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, “To the pure all things are pure.”
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those tangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held for ever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.

But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled—
Glad to be so—and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner of young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.

Edwin Muir

A good poem to begin the year with.

Ourselves made new, new eyes to see with, new hands to hold things that are holy.

A glimpse of the unfallen world - have we experienced this?

How Muir writes - "did we see that day the unseeable/one glory of the everlasting world/perpetually at work though never seen" - 

reminds me of how a vision of this everlasting world has sustained me throughout my life.

Things are falling apart, yes, but there is a kingdom underneath, incorrupt, unfailing. And as a citizen of that enduring order, that eternal rule, the difference is not merely outside - it is within. Death is undone in me, because my King has conquered it.

Death, the Green Unraveller, is beaten at his work. As he labours to destroy, his work reverses. His divisions cause connection, his wounds enourage healing, his hatreds distill into a longing for love.

I love this poem.

It has so much in it I need to think on.

The Winter Palace

jennifer irvine

The Winter Palace

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints,

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

Philip Larkin

 

Forgetting. 

It seems like a good way to end the year.

Let's give endings their due.

Let's give the covering over, the forgiving, the yes, forgetting, it's place.

A time for everything, right?

And this is the time for an end.

 

Let it go.

Let it be.

Forget it.

 

A Christmas Childhood

Morgan Weistling

A Christmas Childhood

1.

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost –
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven’s gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw –
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood’s. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch,
Or any common sight, the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

2.

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.

And old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk –
The melodion.’ I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade –
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

Patrick Kavanagh

"And I was six Christmases of age."

Isn't that the truth of it - for a child to measure life by wonder?