To be published in the Fall 2025 edition of Accidental Magazine. A cheery poem about dementia, loss, and the beauty of companionship.
Sundowning
and bends away from us
I call you by name
though you do not hear me.
You close your doors;
light is your brief foe.
Or so you tell me
as you ambush even yourself.
You draw shades
with lead. You swallow the poison
just to make sense.
“I arm myself against you
by drowning,” you offer.
You salt our memory with this one-way truth.
How I yearn to navigate the book of your life!
I ask you to fetch facts
off the erased pages of your journal
and instead you mark canvas lifeboats
on a wide and silent sea.
Entries float on each other.
Palimpsest distractions play on neurons,
vellum, and vanity. In place of speech
your hands catch fish.
You mute confusion with aphasia and mudras.
You remember that in the nunnery
the sign of honey is to set your finger on your tongue.
“Look, dear one, my blood dries on a finger like ink.
Turn around, let me write the password
on your back, then rub away my mistakes,
and tell you storm lies,” I try to sound like rain.
You chuckle when I slap
the bee I pretend is there.
There is sweetness in this familiarity,
though your laughter isn’t yours.
It comes from another day.
*
This page loses all the words
you scratched in me.
I make a topic sentence to hold
your cold synapses. Then a sonnet of denials.
All to ease the swelling.
I bend this sentence to fit in your hands
just as eventide folds my fear
into rabbit’s ears of rain.
I beg you to recall
when we ducked for shelter
under eaves whose music
was the rattle of small birds
then we slow-danced
in redemptive syncopation.
Your blind contentment was relentless.
How I loved being your mute safe harbor.
But now time has swapped our senses
and dried the details of your touch,
the scent of your closeness,
the music of your breath,
the wild beauty of your conclusions.
Now your body arms itself
with high tide and low expectation.
This sentence refuses to surface
from the gathering murk, the stumbles.
Its three words are cartoon fingers.
I promised honey from rock
but I failed you.
As if to prove I am a dupe, I confirm
my wild addiction to the folly
of our hasty bodies, and how now
dusk’s torch song
forms a foreign tongue in our ears.
I see tonight that the kaleidoscope
of your eyes will never
friend my skin again.
I don’t know our end,
but three words sink, waiting.
*
At dinner I tie a bib on these words.
The words that would fill the air
with the world
should you hear them.
But it’s too late, my comrade.
We’ve already picked the pocket of time.
The silver pole holding up the universe
falls with the sun.
In this hour before skunks
the shimmer and glare
of cause and effect decline.
The machine freezes and steals our life.
Evensong sharpens its edge
to cut the pattern of our dwindling.
*
Error, error, fatal error.
We’ve forgotten this operating system
came from stars
even if it will not last another night.
Supper’s ready and we grimace
and bare teeth. We eat eternity.
We fooled the facial recognition test --
the surrender to hypervigilance
misses what’s true.
It stings, this bitter grace.
Your face cuts into me
with a voice that calls my name.
The luminous emptiness
reveals it wasn’t you
who had turned from light, but I.
It was I who did not hear your call.
It was your voice naming me.
Now a silence curates our
long loneliness.
A loneliness that holds us together
more tightly than ever.