Sometimes we are disguised from ourselves.
Followed by a gray kitten, he wanders from room
to room, not knowing why or where.
But before that, he could calculate the distance
from Minneapolis to Kansas City or describe orange
and green banded caps worn by denizens of Peru.
He knew well the Capital of his Home State and could plan
a picnic in the Adirondacks before the descent of snow
or go boating aware of reptiles in the Everglades.

 

He was able to mimic the call of crow and finch
and smell the early symptoms of the flu
or know when yellow roses bloomed in Arizona.
He could gauge longitudes and latitudes of Argentina
and remember in Albania, when rains were plentiful,
as a child he had seen a great brown bear climb a tree.
He recognized the cratered moon and welcomed the morning
star as a friend, could recite many words of Latin.

 

But the sound of sizzling bacon in a pan became a baby’s cry.
And at the beginning of the end, his mind was alone
in its cave of bone, pictographs of shaggy beasts falling as shadows
upon the walls. At last he forgot to blow upon a dying ember.