It's not the home I had though they tell me I'm home now that I'm safe (but what of all these strangers here about that no one mentions). So many comings and goings. Someone must have left the front door open. Who was it said: Doors forget but only doors know what it is doors forget.1 Carl somebody or other. I forget things. But I know I'm not allowed to lock the door. There's always a draft though and ugly faces peeking through the frosted glass.
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Today there's a bowl of flowers on the hall table, full of names I know for sure like tulips, pink, and cheerful. Makes me think of a painterly poem with nice rhymes I knew by heart: The tulips make me want to see— The tulips make the other me (The backwards one who’s in the mirror, The one who can’t tell left from right), 2 The backwards me walks around now but not out there. There's three flower beds chock full of rainbow colours. Plants aren't supposed to stand in roll call lines. They should be allowed to move but I can never go to them, not without a shadow.
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Down the hall's a lounge with comfy chairs that lost their comfiness, probably before the war. It smells a bit too so I spray beeswax polish. It's good for the furniture and reminds me of church: The Lord revealed to me that I am full of birds turned smoke and hookèd strings.3 That was Margarita Mary or some such and my head's like a pigeon's nest but it’s hard to think with that television always on, droning on and on. Folk just sitting and staring. We used to call it the goggle box. Sometimes it talks under its breath.
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There is a room here though where no one goes but me. It's full of things I used to have, A small bed and chair with knitted cushions. A picture of Jim before he left and lots of children with blonde hair. Some, they say are mine, but I never see them. How does it go? for the leaves were full of children, hidden excitedly, containing laughter...human kind cannot bear something something what might have been and what has been"4
Every morning when I wake I say: 'hello walls, so this is where I am'. It helps me to remember.
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- Carl Sandburg “Doors” ↩︎
- A. E. Stallings “Tulips” ↩︎
- Mary Margaret Alvarado “The Chapter of the Rending in Sunder” ↩︎
- T. S. Eliot “Burnt Norton” (#1 The Four Quartets”) ↩︎
Jennifer Wagner is our guest prompter for the Poetic Challenge “So This Is…Ted Kooser, or Local Wonders” in which we take Kooser’s poem on Nebraska as exemplar, using his opening line “So this is”. and letting our poetry fill in all the details of our chosen place. This prose style poem, immerses in the inner world and outer place of a woman with dementia onset, who obviously loved poetry. It arose spontaneously though apt since November is Alzheimer’s Awareness month
PoetryPix 