drank from horns and cauterized their 
own lopped -off limbs,


a tradition which kept everything in Order: 
tools, feelings, women, children, people, 
color. Father, I finally asked for your love. 
I was stunned in the silence 
while you struggled like a child attempting 
to play a violin. I hugged you awkwardly. 
For this, I had come home.


Sections of your colon and stomach 
had been removed, your knee replaced, 
13 times under the knife, you said. 
You were repeating yourself, mixing up the 
punchlines, the characters were limping in 
your stories.


Organs, children, memory 
then mother. Trumped by 
death and Alzheimer's: 
gone your house, your independence, 
and we placed you in a Senior's home 
on some Pennsylvania mtn. too far 
for your few living friends to visit 
and begrudingly returned to our own worlds.


In time we moved you to a 28d home closer to what 
used to be home: Alzheimer's advanced swfflly 
and anywhere was foreign. 
When all the money drained away 
into intensive care 
we could only situate you 
in the County Home: clean, sparse, 
desolate, the end of the road 
where you ruminated for the last 7 years of your life, 
mumbling incoherently about escape; 
eventual elopement with nurses, your future jobs as Head Chef at 
the State University, German Professor, and then 
President of the Universe.


We named your experience Alzheimer's: 
an old man in diapers whizzing ceaselessly 
in his wheelchair in the bare-boned 
Theatre of Purgatory.