THE CLOCK SHOE

   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 the 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 to 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.

                       From Prairie Schooner
 

   REVELATION

   Startled by his bare foot
   hidden all these years
   beneath black socks, I look
   at my father’s bone whiteness
   standing on a dark braided rug,
   see his slender toes, their fragile
   grip on his world, and a large
   angular bunion, a secret burden
   he’s pressed beneath him
   for much of eighty-five years.                                              
                            UP                

I wish to thank Jean Tolle for her generous help and assistance regarding this publication. G.Mesh

He has asked me to help him -
something he’s never asked before -
to clip his split nail that keeps snagging,
like memory, on tiny threads.

I am motionless,
lost in the whiteness of this foot.

                   From Willow Review

NO RETURN

At Pioneer Park I search for the giant swings
where once I flew with the eagle
and found the secrets of Indians.

I reach the chain link barrier where
an honest herd grazed on the short grass
of the plains that went forever to my young eyes.

I knew if I climbed over that ten-foot barrier
and followed the buffalo I could find
the edge of the world.

Today I see two: scraggly, dusty,
hunched over they look weak.
I turn my back and walk up the rock-imbedded hill

where a statue kneels, fanning his fire
with a metal blanket. I look skyward
for messages, but only see clouds.

                 From Midwest Quarterly

ONION EVENINGS

I smell onions browning

and our old white frame
house reappears like a puff
of flour dusting the air,
its gray shingled roof muted
by bright shutters added,
her solution for zest.

This night my child interrupts
as I prepare the soup.
I spill the flour, and add
too much sherry. I am startled
to hear an old woman
speak through my lips, “Don’t
bother me when I’m cooking.”

         From Midwest Quarterly   

RETURN                               ©S.Berris