The Missing Word - John Field

               after a poem by Wistawa Szymborska                                                                                                                     

My short term memory is going bad,

missing in action almost as often

as lost luggage at a baggage roundabout.

When I woke up this morning

my house was exactly where it was supposed to be,

in complete agreement with the street,

and my garden was still here, too, with little flowers

blooming as in a child’s crayon drawing,

but I could not remember a single thing I did yesterday,

person I met or program I watched on the tube.

If my conscience had hands they would be clean

and intent as usual on saving the world,

but if a crime had been committed in my neighborhood

I would not have had an alibi. 

Things have come to this: I’m growing old.

                                                                                                                                              

I was always a master at forgetting my faults,

this way the dust, that way the smoke, 

but where was my mind when the kettle boiled dry

and why is my neighbor’s last name

a ship in a bottle I can’t get out?

Next year if I’m still around instead of a newspaper 

clipping it will take carbon dating

to determine exactly how old I am.

Taking Viagra at my age

would be like clinging to a life raft

after the ship’s gone down.

Using my legs as crutches

and my feet until they won’t anymore

picture me shuffling up and down hallways 

like an ambulatory museum piece

searching for the room where the answers

to whatever happens next are kept,

and when I finally arrive there 

asking myself why the word I was chasing 

took off like a dog without a master

in the middle of the night.

Find it I will if I live long enough 

filed away in my information somewhere 

like a blade of grass in an acre of lawn,

and when I do an entire Sunday

of church bells will ring.              

Until then I’ll hang fast to my chandelier

like an upside-down bat 

swinging this way and that,

to and fro, fro and back 

but not back and fro or forth and back 

while I wait for my piper 

to arrive with his magic flute, 

his drum boom boom 

and the missing word 

he’ll inscribe on the tip of my tongue.

Believe me, at my age it’s not the present

but the thought that counts.        

These days when friends ask me

if I need psychiatric help 

I assure them my dead brother, 

his three nicknames and I

are no longer on speaking terms. 

No, not those voices again—ever!