The notion of a stroke was then as new
as having to apply the thing to you.
It’s you I saw when meeting with the world,
well dressed in a proper hat and chesterfield—
and then—your ease with words all but erased,
your life had landed in a world where place
reduced your reach to home, a chair and bed.
The man I knew I soon gave up for dead.
I was a fool; you drifted out of mind.
And yet you’d found what I was yet to find:
peace with the world, the ability to hear
and understand with an attentive ear
what you could not express in speech: the songs
of birds, detachment from parental wrongs.
                        

When I saw you for the first time in your bed—
the hair—no, someone else’s—now gone white—
and how she looked, whose every hour was now yours.
And “progress” can be little but deception,
a verbalized placebo for a son,
too busy and preoccupied to hear
the wishful thinking shading her own voice.

Much later when I saw you—months had passed—
you walked (if with a cane); you smiled at me
more lovingly (I recall today); perhaps
my petty grievances masked it before.
Hugging me with one good arm, you tried
to rise from where you spent your ordered days.
With you, locked into monosyllabic hell,
I’d ask a simple question you’d forget.
Your reply (in essence), eye to eye,
dead-ended with the heartache of your try.
                        

I rarely thought about your thoughts. Did you
still think in well-formed sentences,
intact, then choked off at the sentence-end,
a verbal riot at the gate, in panic,
trampled before escape? I could have tried
to find the way to meaning in the chaos,
asked probing questions systematically,
explored in full what yes and no reveal.
How much more I’d know now, had I tried.
I had eight years to ask before you died.