Alzheimer’s

He sits, silent, 
no longer mistaking the cable 
news for company—

and when he talks, he talks of childhood, 
remembering some slight or conundrum 
as if it is a score to be retailed

and settled after seventy-five years.

Rare, the sudden lucidity 
that acknowledges this thing
that has happened
to me… 

More often, he recounts 
his father’s cruelty
or a chance deprived 
to him, a Negro
                  under Jim Crow. 

Five minutes ago escapes him 
as he chases 1934, unaware

of the present beauty out the window,
the banks of windswept snow—

or his wife, humming in the kitchen, 
or the twilit battles in Korea, or me

when he remembers that I am his son.

This condition—with a name that implies 
the proprietary, 
possession, 
                           spiritual
and otherwise—

as if it owns him,
which it does.

Copyright © 2024 by Anthony Walton. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 8, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“This poem derives from my (and my family’s) experience with the last ten years or so of my father’s life. It attempts to fathom not only my own confusion and upset but also to understand and be compassionate toward what he himself was experiencing. The circumstance was both sad and tragic, and also angering, because, in my judgment, he in no way deserved what and how he was suffering. He was a husband, a father, a veteran, a church leader, a tireless community leader. So, it is an attempt at making peace, both with myself and the circumstances.”
—Anthony Walton