Aberrations

Written for Day 17 of Poems in April at 'imaginary garden with real toads' where we are asked to reference the e.e. cummings title: The Mind Is Its Own Beautiful Prisoner

Aberrations

'Don't forget to bring back

my funny little thing,' she said.

Those words. So next time I visited 

I returned the strange-shaped vase

that had held the flowers she gave me.

'Where's my plastic food container

I asked you for?' she said.

'What's this?' she exclaimed, gesturing

at my car. 'You've got a new one?'

'Yes, but you've seen it,' I said. 

'No, never.' So I showed it to her,

refraining from saying it was the same one 

she rode in two weeks previously

when I drove her to visit her daughter.

'Who was it died, in your life?' she asked,

after reading my book of poems.

'Oh,' I said. 'Remember, after we saw 

that Angie McDowell movie, I told you

it was my story too? I told you all about it. 

(You even asked, was it true or fiction.)' 

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I don't recall.'

Wife, mother, grandmother, hostess, 

businesswoman, gardener, traveller,

patron of the arts, and generous friend;

there's nothing wrong with her mind –

except occasionally it cordons off

small sections of itself, seeming to say

privately: 'You don't need that.'

Although this friend is ageing now, she doesn't have dementia; she's always had this quirk.