Poem by Lynn D. Gilbert

It’s all now now; nothing else has happened.
If I ask him what he just ate, he looks around the table
and makes some guesses: “Coffee. Toast. An egg?”

He can read one newspaper page for an hour.
His mind is a stretch of detached boxcars
marooned on a grass-grown siding.

Even TV’s a blank: A tall guy jumps; he shines
with sweat, he grabs a rebound, but
what’s the score? how’s the game going?

what’s the history between these teams?
At the bottom of the bowl of alphabet soup,
there are letters but no meaning.

Once in a while the shifting fog will open
on a sunlit valley sixty or eighty years away...
All the little white farmhouses are there

and the new fenceposts; the horns in the high school
band strike up; I see him there playing the baritone.
Now-palsied fingers pump smoothly on the three valves

and the feet that today hardly lift off the floor
step out right on the beat. And then, in such
a moment, if I ask him, “What breed of hog

is this, here in this magazine?”
after two or three tries I get his attention
and he grasps my meaning and responds,

“They’re red Duroc,” certain and clear
as if he’d never left off work and retired
twenty-five years ago come October.