Dementia
he draws long and hard on the chocolate shake I brought him in the hospital & a smile crosses his face between the final slurps sounding like a Shop-Vac sucking water off a flooded basement floor “Thanks for this” he says holding up the empty cup still smiling “Better than the tapioca they feed me here”
his eyes focus on a baseball game on TV “the Tampa Bay Rays are having a good year” Detroit is leading 12-0 in the third inning I ask him about the book on his night table he thanks me for it but it is not from me none of this seems to matter to him at all it will be forgotten by morning if not before
I sometimes wonder if someday I will end up just like him my own memory slipping I see faces but no longer remember names a favorite song but I can’t remember why a poem I wrote but can no longer remember it is becoming a constant reason for concern will I descend into this mental midnight
we sit quietly and talk about nothing special & he asks me if maybe I can bring him a chocolate shake the next time I come to visit he continues to stare at the TV on the wall Detroit is now leading 16-0 in the fifth “Looks like the Rays may go to the Series”
Ketchum
his vacant eyes fixated
on the dark gaze
of twin steel barrels
silent but not vacant
then firmly squeezed
eternity rushed in
like an exploding nova
then an accumulating silence
his sudden disappearance
reverberating along Big Wood River
passing far beyond the Sawtooths
who was he
this avatar for all
fathers looking at their sons
pondering & wondering
how they have failed them
wanting desperately to know
how not to fail them
one more time
Paradise
In Memory of Jim Harrison (1937-2016)
I envision Liu Zongyuan’s old man fishing from a solitary boat on a cold river
evoking a place I often find myself wishing to return to with its purity and peaceful silence an old man seeking what only one can truly find
long before the sun crests Absaroka peaks & greets with the dewed perfume of sagebrush I roam among the stones at the river’s hard margins
snow has left the valley & run-off is days away the river still quiet & winter-chilled gives rise to blizzard hatches of blue wing olives & I watch the nymphs emerge
escaping their shucks & drying their wings to take flights as lurking cutthroats rise to the midges enticing a strike along the edges of soft currents cutbanks & pools
& the Yellowstone’s back eddies as the old man waits catching a fish is not important as he stares at the water whiling away time alone enjoying a quiet cold river
*Liu Zongyuan (773-819) was a poet of the Tang Dynasty in China. This is a reference to his poem “Jiang Xue” [River Snow].
Sonoran Daybreak
lighting the morning’s first cigarette curtains billow with a breeze in soft light she lies in bed enveloped in a quiet stillness as he measures her breathing at daybreak he watches as she purses her lips sighing gently among the pillows a few hours earlier he had embraced her the way sleep never can & her cool skin the discreet feel of the long familiar
the night before they dreamed of a day in the Sonoran desert as a storm approached the air around them sizzling with electricity lightning spiking the desert floor & thunder rolled fingers of rain caressed them both gently & the sweet scent of sagebrush freshened the air as the storm passed further west
tonight he will return alone to this familiar bed crushing out the day’s last cigarette trying to approach an uneasy sleep tomorrow he will rise again early & imagine her four thousand miles away alone in her own bed with her entangled dreams anamnesis of that Sonoran desert storm as she reaches out to touch her own dawn
Williston Road
many times I have traveled the Williston Road once when a storm blew off the Gulf of Mexico once in a swamp fog once on a gibbous moon waning as I wondered why he chose to disappear shedding family & friends suddenly & so easily gone yet in plain view
many times I have traveled this long rural highway this time perhaps the last time there has been no explanation to my past question why no words at all this time a plastic trachea stifles speech as it fills the lungs the respirator a constant clicking
returning home now this painfully familiar road its skirtings of live oak burdened by Spanish moss approaching storms swamp fogs & moons whether waning or waxing all soon to be forgotten once blue-edged flame has taken all that remains to its final disappearance
Steven B. Rogers is a historian and research consultant based in Washington, DC. He is the editor of A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines published by CavanKerry Press in 2004. His historical and personal essays, literary criticism, and poetry have been widely published, including in past numbers of Gargoyle. He and his wife reside in historic Mount Rainier, Maryland.