Poets and Poetry: They will never die

Alzheimer's: The Wife
She answers the bothersome telephone, takes the message,
forgets the message, forgets who called.
One of their daughters, her husband guesses: the one with the
dogs, the babies, the boy Jed?
Yes, perhaps, but how tell which, how tell anything when all
the name tags have been lost or switched,
when all the lonely flowers of sense and memory bloom and
die now in adjacent bites of time?
Sometimes her own face will suddenly appear with terrifying
inappropriateness before her in a mirror.
She knows that if she's patient, its gaze will break, demurely,
decorously, like a well-taught child's,
it will turn from her as though it were embarrassed by the
secrets of this awful hide-and-seek.
If she forgets, though, and glances back again, it will still be in
there, furtively watching, crying.
-C.K. Williams

Prodigy
I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.

That must have been in 1944.

In the set we were using,
the paint has almost chipped off
the black pieces.

The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.

I'm told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.

I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.

In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.
-Charles Simic

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even
heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
- Billy Collins