Yourself

Your fingernails have grown far too long
and there is old food or worse underneath them.
I have brought clippers and I cut them for you,
pinching you only once,
leaving dull crescents
on the wooden bench.
Some fall through
the slats to the concrete slabs beneath.

When I have filed each nail,
and with a careful finger
you have checked for rough edges,
you tell me you feel like yourself again.

Old

Maybe these moments of feeling that nothing feels right, are not wrong. The wind sighing in the elder and honeysuckle, the sound of L pushing the mower, the smell of white lilies in a pot, and glorious late afternoon August sunshine. Yet my body feels like a badly tuned radio, not receiving correctly, all hiss and static. All crackle. My throat aches but has no idea what it wants to say or to cry about. Old, old, my body feels an old thing, a fragment of a time when nothing could be made right, when there was no comfort, as certainly there is now.

Fragments

You are you but not the same you,
alive, your hair and toenails growing,
your mind on other things.
You do not remember yesterday
can't imagine tomorrow,
watch with the absorption of an infant
the single magpie who hops towards us
across the grass, glorious in black and white,
say what a handsome fellow.

You no longer ask for anything
expect anything,
yet your need has not been greater
since you were a tiny child
dependent on others
for food, clothes and shelter.