All Comfortless

My doddery father yells
Mother! when they tie
him down in the hospital,
and then, lip quivering, sobs
I’ve always been a good person, why,
why are you doing this to me?
Mother, help me!

He is pummeling down a tunnel
of dark blurred namelessness, looking for
a clearing bright as day
on the other side of time,
a meadow hedged in
by the protection of pines
where she waits astride a courser,
with her stanchion
and flag, bearing his face.
She will hoist him
into her arms. He will lie down
in her smell; he will drink
the wind in her sleeves. His honor will be
restored.

I want to take a knife
and slash his shackles,
but his bald head is crested
with a swollen bump, his rump—
as if made of something other
than flesh—looks as solidly purple
as a velvet caparison.
Here they protect him
from falls, but do not protect
him. His dignity a stolen
and hidden treasure, and no-one
sets out on the quest.

Outside, near the hospital steps,
there is a dog who sits
in the filthy lap of a homeless man
with a few black teeth muttering
on the filthy sidewalk, and growls low
in her throat if someone
she doesn’t like passes
too close, and sleeps there in his lap,
curled up, utterly
happy.

This is for the Husband

who sits outside the dressing
room, a purse on his lap,

who brings her the 14,
and suppresses the murmur
numbers don’t matter

who holds a violet sweater
against her face

This is for the husband
who attempts to wield the curling iron
for her curly hair, when her right wrist
breaks in a fall

who schedules their walk
in the mall, out of the dangerous
sun, and thunks his metal-clawed
cane, as she wobbles her walker
forward—his clothes matching
her desert colors: rock white, sand beige,
bleached skull grey

This is for the husband wearing
a tonsure of white straw
as he says the rosary
of  pink and white pills into the napkin
beside her bowl of Cheerios:
Colace, Avandia, Aricept;
Amlodipine, Lipitor, Lasix

This is for the lucky husband

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of  two books and two chapbooks of poetry, the most recent being Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (Litchfield Review Press, 2008).  Her poems, as well as the occasional short story and personal essay have appeared in numerous print and online journals including Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, The Hiram Poetry Review, Poetry International, The Women’s Review of Books and The Pedestal, as well as in a dozen anthologies or text books, including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young(Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions, 2008), Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, edited by Holly Hughes (Kent State University Press, 2009), and Love over 60: An Anthology of Women's Poems (Mayapple Press, 2010).  She is also the author of a critical study: KING LEAR and the Naked Truth (Duke U.P., 1998).  Ms. Kronenfeld is a Lecturer Emerita in the Department of Creative Writing, at the University of California, Riverside.