Today's poem is by Jim Daniels

The Deep End
       

My father found my mother, ninety, crawling
on the floor near her bed twice this week.

I think she is trying to sneak away from death
but death is having none of it.

Or she is trying to crawl toward death
but death is playing hard to get, elusive

given her blindness and inability to walk.
Death isn't even giving her the old Marco

for her Polo. Or maybe she's the one
saying Marco. In her rarer lucid moments

she's busy apologizing to other lucid moments.
Me, I'm trying to picture her swimming,

or forgetting to swim.

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Copyright © 2024 Jim Daniels All rights reserved
from Sugar House Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission