by Nicole Koch

When I met you, your hair was missing,
skin sagged like canvas grocery bags,
eyes aloof circling me like Hula-Hoops
while drinking ginger tea they told you was whiskey
you and I believed anything.

By the time you fell and cracked your head
open it was empty, you couldn’t read
yesterday’s tragedies in the newspaper
resting on your frozen front door step,
books turned on you like God
gone missing. There was nothing left to do
but go mad, back then they used you
as a test specimen, you would have had better luck
being the Tin Man in a lightening storm
in a pool. At least they gave you art
therapy an hour a week to relieve the burden
of missing out on everything there is to know,
the end table you made stands next to my bed,
even the marbles have a melancholy hue screwed in
to four legs, still the bottom cries Jane 1968. I’m twenty now,
the same age you were when you
graduated college and got married.

They say you were an English teacher, eccentric
yes, yet excellent, head of the class spelling words
you couldn’t hold onto, you played golf and like
a sweet old lady told the grounds keeper
fuck off when he said no women, they say you saw the
world, you were a world, they say you raised a genius
and a delinquent, you loved your many grandkids,
before you forget them and made
imaginary friends, they say you walked to the beat
of your own drum, until the drum won.

They say I remind them of you.