Two poems written about my mother while helping my father care for her. She is gone now, but I have these drops of thought in the ocean that is my loss. 

Chocolate For My Mother Lost in Thought
(Making Sense of Alzheimer's)
 
She's not hungry for that
Now
Why Insist?
 
Where has her father been for so
Long
He knew she liked chocolate.
 
Not what this old tender offers
Gone
In this prison world:
 
Her cravings and needs
Have
Reverse-etched a mind
 
Left with little
Comfort
Only chatter on the air.
 
From a time that has come to
Pass
But faintly remembered in
 
The kindness of a stranger that
Offers a
Once forbidden ransom of
 
Sweets
To blue gnarls
Still beautiful practiced hands.
 
She was once
Lovelier
Than this
 
Chocolate that pardons a
Smile
To freely trace a line from
 
Now to then.
 

The Game You Can Not Beat
(Making Sense of Alzheimer's)
 
Watching the blush of confusion color your face
Is like the end of the world:
Always coming, but tomorrow.
 
You surface now and again
Less in the now than on a road more traveled a day or two or
From long ago.
 
The grains of light that play across your face
Are of a different nature:
A wavelength I wish I’d never seen.
 
The clattering of connections missed
Or those found buried by the difficulty of
Missing the jump or a random routing across a synapse.
 
Pathways easily run in the past
But obscured by tangles and turns
More desperate than real.
 
The simple act of a game
Seems to be about looking for a sign           
In the 52 you loved and played so well.
 
Celebrate!
 
You know red on black in descending order.
For a brief second hope at the turn of a card
Then rules shift to those only you see in the darkness.
 
Rules to a game still the same in name only.
The irony at the end of your world is
That you seem so lost in
 
Solitaire.