Mother can't remember who I am,
talks in riddles, shifts place
and time mid-sentence.
Her body looks the same, her face
under a tent of tidy gray hair,
sweet, alert, yet wild-eyed.
Of memories we shared
and used to laugh about
I have my half only.
She thinks she's in trouble
with her mother for staying out too late
with a girlfriend, both long dead.
Today when I visit Mother
she opens the door a crack.
She calls me aside to ask,
"Who is that man?
He's very nice, and I don't
want to hurt his feelings,"
as she points toward my father,
"but I really must have him leave now."
They've been wed for fifty years.
I give her that simple Alzheimer's test, the task
of drawing a clock face with paper and pencil,
but she ponders, "Hmm, a clock?"
and stalls. "I could draw a violin."
A clock sits on the table in front of her
and she deftly draws a shoe. "A clock shoe,"
we laugh and begin a new set of memories
that will last her only for minutes.
