POEM

I’m in Food Mart buying sugar and cat food, and I don’t even use sugar and I don’t have a cat.  This sort of thing has been happening a lot lately.

I’m sitting at a desk—at work, I suppose—and a man who seems to know me lays a stack of files on my desk, smiles, and says, “You know what to do, Spike.”  I don’t know who Spike is and I don’t know what to do, but I smile back and say, “Sure.”  

Or this woman slips into bed beside me at night and sits up reading Jaws and eating Turkish Delight.  She doesn’t say a word to me though I want to say, “Excuse me, do I know you?”

Yesterday, or last week or sometime, I was walking down 119^th street and I simply couldn’t remember

where I’d come from or where I was going, and then I wished I’d been at one of those business conventions wearing a nametag.  What would it have said?

It’s 5.17 a.m. and I’m sitting in a room writing this poem for you, but I don’t know who you are.

MARK

Mark, my son, is on our front porch, leaning on the railing, talking to himself.  My heart is breaking and I’d thought it was already broken and couldn’t break anymore.

I remember the first time I saw Mark flapping his arms and I said, “Oh, Jesus, no, please Jesus, no!”

He started telling himself stories, most of them from movies he’d watch over and over, “And then penguin says to him, ‘You can’t do that, my friend,’ and squirts him with the ketchup bottle, and rabbit says, ‘What a mess you’ve made . . .”

I tell myself I should be glad he’s happy, and I am, I am, it’s just that I know this world and I know how many bad people there are who will try to rip his happiness from him.

I go out to the front porch, sit beside Mark who doesn’t seem to notice me.  He says, “Nothing at all, thank you,” when I ask him if he needs anything, and goes back to telling himself a story.

NIGHTCAP

I sit at my kitchen table with my old friend.
We’ve each got a glass of red wine.
“I gave you as long as I could,” he says.
I thank him, raise my glass:
“Cheers to all of us,
to our beginnings and our ends!”

“You made the most of your days and nights,”
he says.  “You’re leaving a lot of good things behind.”
“It’s been fine,” I say.  “No regrets, none.
Even the hard times were all mine.”
Glass almost empty.  Last sip of wine.

LIVING WITH CHILDREN

No washcloths in the bathroom.
I wash my face in water cupped in my hands.
Later, by chance, I find two washcloths
on top of a box in my closet,
a bed made for a toy dachshund
and flamingo, napping
while my girls are at school.

Poet’s Statement:

On “Poem”: When writing this poem, I think I was influenced (without realizing it at the time) by my father’s Alzheimer’s, when things stopped making sense to him, though he tried so hard to understand.

On “Mark”:This narrator is shaken when she realizes that her son is showing one of the behaviors associated with autism, flapping his arms.  She loves him but realizes that his autism makes him more vulnerable in a dangerous world. She wants to help him, to protect him, but doesn’t know how.

On “Nightcap”: Death comes to us all so best be prepared for it.  I hope it might go like this for me, that I will be cool about it.

On “Living with Children”: I’ve been reading my journals and notebooks from the 1990s when my two daughters were young.  I don’t think I wrote this as a poem at the time.  It was just a note.  When I reread it after decades, it seems like an absolute wonder.

Brian Daldorph teaches creative writing, literature, and writing classes in the English department at the University of Kansas. He has also taught in Japan, Senegal, and England. His two books of poems, The Holocaust and Hiroshima: Poems, and Outcasts, were both published by Mid-America Press. He edits Coal City Review. His poems, stories, articles, and reviews have been widely published. From the poem “Outcast”: On cold nights he wraps himself in his great white beard/and seals gather round him/to keep Jack O’Bones warm.