My mother’s husband,
easily confused,
sat at the restaurant table
in tears,
nerves imploded.
He pleaded with her for help,
to make the conversation
stop.
We acquiesced,
he quieted,
his soul a
corpse-brown
husk.
Twelve years later
he and my mother are both
dead. Last week the family
restaurant where we sat
burned
to the ground.
(No. 65 in a series of responses to Han-Shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)
When the “family restaurant” burned in nearby Poulsbo earlier this year, it occasioned this reflection on the last Christmas visit my mother and her husband made to Bainbridge Island. It seemed like these annual visits, with their pleasures and challenges, would go on forever. But by about this last visit they had become, between the two of them and with luck, one functioning person. Dementia had conquered him, though he still offered her a steady arm. She was badly crippled by arthritis, but maintained a sharp mind.
(Numeric reference to Han-shan’s poem reflects the order of presentation in Burton Watson’s translation, presented as Cold Mountain, Columbia University Press, 1970.)
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