Dorothy, in the Dementia Ward

By Noel Thistle Tague

Dear plaque, dear tangle, dear knot
of undoing, dear daily vanishings—
keys, directions, sisters dead and alive

—dear harbinger of strangers, dear you:
the beads slipped the string again, just
as I was about to fix the clasp. Almost

perfect this time. Red prisms scatter
the floor, refracting sunlight like tiny
emergencies. You have taken so much.

Another missing person wanders off
into the night with nothing, not even
her name. Leaving as a girl defying

the house marm’s rules, coming to as
an old woman dishabille on the banks
of a minor body of water—a creek,

a brook, a kill, someplace where eddies
casually tumble a ragged leaf like a song
about time. About time: what if what

you inherit is forgetting? Your great-
grandmother, grandmother, father:
what will you do when it is your turn?

Run naked into the highway? Hold
your body like your arms belong to
your dead mother? Hum that old Bing

Crosby tune like it’s the last and only
language you know? The strangers arrive
with too much in their eyes. They want—

what? To solve the keys’ disappearance,
to be the arms that hold you. Disease,
touch not this house. You are a blight

that blackens language. If self is cast
in the grasp of one’s relationship
to others, you are the fire that razes

the forge. If the dead are only as stead-
fast as what the living remember, you
are the bleed. If the body is a house,

you are the carpenter ants in the joists
and the bank at the door. Nonetheless
you will have me, which is why I leave

a paper trail. The strangers again—
be patient, I am opening my mouth.
For I have finally strung the words:

Aphasia would be a beautiful name for a daughter.

Each day she staggers out of death
with beads in her pockets and whirls off
on her bicycle into the white afternoon.  

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Noel Thistle Tague grew up in the Thousand Islands Region of northern New York State, where she learned to endure a good cold snap and wait for the ground to thaw. She now lives in a small town in mid-coast Maine with her family and works at the University of Maine at Augusta, where she is an assistant professor of English. Every so often, her children play quietly together, and she writes.

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