My Father’s Dementia
He has forgotten his grudges,
forgets to be mean.
In a bed now, with a broken hip,
he cries, Oh, God,
oh, God, I’m insane,
Put me in a home.
You’re in the hospital, I say,
by which I mean
it is close to a home
and very far from a home
like the home he made for us
growing up.
No point in saying any of that.
I want him not to suffer.
Caring for those who don’t care for us
is like working in a hospital,
it takes training
then becomes habit.
Aubade at Six Months
Sunlight shoves itself through the window,
so I make myself open the door.
The basil’s flowering, its leaves a little thinner
and tough now the light is going gold.
The stray cat’s at my ankles already
weaving her figure eights
and the neighbor dog lies in the grass
her nose held high
as if she’s memorizing the wind,
what it’s carrying today,
comparing it to yesterday, maybe,
last year at this time,
damp grass, black walnut husks
just starting to brown,
bacon, the garbage truck,
shampoo of high school girls
walking the alley to school—
what a morning contains,
a hyperlocal inhalation
this sixth-month morning since
I had a living sister.
Deirdre O’Connor is the author of two books of poems, most recently The Cupped Field, which received the 2018 Able Muse Book Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Bennington Review, On the Seawall, Rust + Moth, JAMA, Cave Wall, and other journals. She directs the Writing Center at Bucknell University.