Fourth Wall Arpeggio

Lately, my friends ask me, out of love,

have I written about my mother,

who suffers under the storm of Alzheimer’s disease,

and I tell them, “I don’t write about my family,

never directly, at least.” To write this poem seems so

out of character for me, but it’s not about my mother,

as much as it’s about how, as a son, the disease

measures the changing rituals of family.

And 28 lines—all I’ve provided myself—seems so

anemic. Now, I barely have 18 lines left for a love

I don’t have the vigor to describe. Reticence is a disease

I’ve suffered from throughout my life. Without family,

I don’t know what it means to live as myself, and, so,

I hide in the reflection of others, which, after all, others love:

people care more about themselves than a friend’s mother.

I mean, how does one explain to someone who’s not family

how you now see the patterns into which a parent would sew

a quilt to lay over a child, the child neither hip to love

nor Hayden’s “austere and lonely offices”? My mother’s

silence seems like indifference except I know the disease,

which changes our relationship, the parent and child; I sow

healing from my memory of how she taught me to love,

not knowing her movement through a day as a mother,

as someone whose sole gig was to keep me alive, free of disease

and, whenever possible, embarrassment. But now, family

means playing the parent; I’m still just a son, writing about love,

but, lowering my eyes from the trauma, I lift her body, her disease,

for a shower, straining under all the love she sowed.