Jackson

“Sometimes I wonder—” he said, halting,
hunting for the words hiding like bugs
in the slashed fields of his brain,
“whether the plants still grow.”

He’d asked me how long it had been
since his stroke. “Six months,”
I said, but he shook his head.
“I don’t understand.”

I counted on my fingers. “December
the seventeenth, so January, February,
March, April, May, June: that’s six.”
He shook his head again,
sighed, studied the wall.

“Sometimes I wonder,” he said,
“whether the plants still grow.”

He used to raise tomatoes,
cabbages, melons, dahlias, marigolds.
He walked behind a self-propelled mower
round and round the school oval,
smoothing it for sports.

What is a season to him now?
What are time and space?
A lap around the corridors,
leaning on the walker,
weak leg dragging?

Between my visits he sits all day
staring through glass at blotchy lawn,
palms, roses, the tawny curls
of the gardener steering
her ride-on.

In April he told me he wished
he hadn’t been found. “I don’t want
to live on like this.”

“I can’t take you
to the vet,” I said.
“Not in this country, anyhow.”
I bring him fresh flowers each week,
water and trim his three plants,

but the chinchilla cat from the brochure
still won’t let him touch her
and the old women have too many wrinkles
for his fifties playboy gaze.
Besides, the bulge in his trousers
is now an incontinence product.

Today when I arrived he had fallen
back in the recliner, toothless
mouth agape, eyelids down,
feet up, nametagged socks
fading in the insistent
winter sun.

First published in London Grip New Poetry December 2022