Jane Thomas
Two Poems
Learning to Swim
‘you will swim without a cork’
Horace, Satires, Book 1.4.120
Forty years ago
I wore orange blow up bands,
in your sepia arms
– a barnacle babe.
Thirty-five years ago
Agnostic Sunday swims
in eighties council chlorine,
– that must have stung.
Twenty-five years ago
Buoyant on beach bubbles,
snorkelling in the shoaling sea,
– jumping crests and jetsam.
Five years ago
You floated in the bath foam,
your flannelled face and mind,
– hiding your ebbing light.
Today
I think of you as I swim,
our green eyes stripped of tear film,
– as my head goes under.
Seven Ways of Looking at Dementia
I
Blindly in denial.
II
Straight in the eye
speaking
calmly
slowly
using only short
simple
sentences.
III
As a list maker
–sit down for socks
–don’t pay the milkman
–press the green button
–eat Magnums
–lock the door.
IV
Through the bottom of your brandy glass.
V
Like a puppeteer performing an end of season run on a vulnerable Victorian pleasure pier
VI
As a wake.
A living decade
(under vigilant watch).
VII
As the shuffle ...
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