Beasts Poem by Carmen Giménez Smith

My siblings and I archive the blanks in my mother's memory,
diagnose her in text messages. And so it begins, I write although

her disease had no true beginning, only a gradual peeling away
until she was left a live wire of disquiet. We frame her illness

as a conceptual resistance—She thinks, yet she is an other—
to make sense of the transformation. She forgot my brother's cancer,

for example, and her shock, which registered as surprise,
was the reaction to any story we told her, an apogee of sublimity

over and over. Once on a walk she told us she thought
she was getting better, and exhausted, we told her she was incurable,

a child's revenge. The flash of sorrow was tempered only
by her forgetting and new talk of a remedy,

and we continued with the fiction because darker dwindling
awaits us like rage, suspicion, delusion, estrangement.

I had once told myself a different story about us.
In it she was a living marble goddess in my house

watching over my children and me. So what a bitter fruit
for us to share, our hands sinking into its fetid bruise,

the harsh flavor stretched over all our days, coloring them grey,
infesting them with the beasts that disappeared her,

the beasts that hid her mail in shoeboxes under her bed,
bills unpaid for months, boxes to their brims. The lesson:

memory, which once seemed impermeable, had always been
a muslin, spilling the self out like water, so that one became

a new species of naïf and martyr. And us, we're made a cabal
of medieval scholars speculating how many splinters of light

make up her diminishing core, how much we might harvest before
she disappears. This is the new love: her children making an inventory

of her failing body to then divide into pieces we can manage—
her shame our reward, and I'll speak for the three of us:

we would have liked her to relish in any of the boons that never came,
our own failures amplified by her ephemeral and fading quality.