My dear, you must have noticed how my tongue 
squirmed over the name of that actress and
the title of the novel I wanted
you to read.  I know you’ve seen me frown and 
rummage through the middle of a sentence.  
It’s as if the verbs are children playing 
hide-and-seek, making faces and giggling 
in a closet.  Am I frightened?  Not of 
death but death-in-life, not of ceasing to 
be but of being mentally flayed inch 
by inch like poor Vivian Malatesta.  
Did I tell you her daughters took her away 
on Monday?  Nothing else for it, I know.  
To this favor and all that.  They put her 
in the same joint where I visited Gert 
Rosenbaum last year.  Gert, a whiz at bridge,  
Gert who published on set theory.  They call it 
Windermere House, as if it hosted 
fox hunts, country weekends.  Spruces and spirea, 
pleasant staff, decent food, inoffensive 
paintings on cream-colored walls, board games, 
heaps of old bestsellers, big-screen TVs.  
Top-of-the-line.  It’s clean and tidy and 
horrible.  I fled.  
			About a year and 
a half ago, Viv phoned me up and begged 
me to rush over.  She sounded desperate.  
A fall, I figured, or bad news about the kids.
  
How about making us some tea and then 
I’ll read you my notes.  Yes, I’ve been making 
notes, and in rhyme, to exorcise and exercise.
The first is about that day it started with Viv.

Something went missing—a spoon or a book.
She couldn’t say what or where we should look.
Was it her compact or a wedge of cheese? 
Something was missing—the remote or her keys.
She rifled the Civic; I looked under the bed.
We didn’t know then that it was her head.

It’s like planing a board.  One curly sliver, 
another swipe, then more, until, at last, 
the board’s no more than a vestige of 
itself, a ghostly wooden vacancy.  
Am I afraid?  I don’t want to find out 
what I’ll be when I can’t remember this 
room, snatches of Yeats and Stevens, Evans 
playing Peace Piece—or you, my dear—when 
there’ll be no self left for me to lose.

Yes, I know I’m not Viv Malatesta but  
it doesn’t cheer me up, though my mother
would think it should.  The secret, she loved to 
say, is comparing down, not up.  I think 
she said it less to instruct me than to 
convince herself she was content with her lot.  
One day, she pointed to this man outside 
the Acme holding up a sign.  It said 
“Will Work For Food.”  See?  Compare down, not up.  
Well, her advice is sound enough but, when 
the storm breaks, of little use.  What Mother 
knew was the secret of settling, not of life, 
of capitulation, not happiness.  
Others are worse off?  Yes, I’ve a roof and an 
income and haven’t yet forgotten who you 
are, my dear. My mind to me a kingdom 
is, and it hasn’t yet turned into Lear’s.  
All the same, I keep forgetting things, words 
fly out of reach; every lost memory feels 
like a caress from the feather of dementia.  
You’d like to cheer me up, reassure me.
And so you do—at least you do the first.  

Last night I slept badly.  I dreamed about 
Vivian and Mother, got up and scribbled this:

Think of a homeless woman and her cart
not the famous painter and her famous art.
Count your blessings, Mother smugly said,
stuck in a marriage that seemed to me stone dead.
Counting your blessed blessings comes up short;
it might be wisdom, but only of a sort.
What help to think of Beethoven gone deaf?
Cold comfort when you forget abcdef.
Poor Viv left pieces of her brain behind.
Beethoven lost his hearing, not his mind.