IT isn't just age, they told me. His mind wanders,
and he won't know who you are, though he's been told;
He'll be gentlemanlike, and he wants
to be part of the conversation. Just string along
and nod, and though he won't make any sense
at all, you'll do fine.

I sat across the table from his chair.
We made a few remarks, aimless and kind,
on weather, and on his daughter's surgery:
the shock, now past, that brought the family briefly
together in Oregon, far from their home in the east.
After a pause, he took up another theme.

I was a trucker; always was a trucker,
and never saw the girls much as they grew.
Margaret did everything, and did it all well,
and raised them, and raised me too, whenever I
stopped by. We did okay, I guess; it's been
forty-nine winters now. He paused again,
and fixed his gaze, it seemed to me, somewhere
beyond my shoulder's horizon.

When I saw Margaret, I knew right away
she was the one. I talked her up and talked
till I ran all out of soda money, and then
we both got done with high school and hitched up,
graduation and wedding all at once, like.
We went up country to the cabin on the lake.
Ever been to Wisconsin?

                    I said no.

If you ever get the chance, go in summer.
Get you a cabin on a lake. Wisconsin
has fine lakes: clean water, mean fish; nothing
like it anywhere else. There was this rock
right by the cabin, see, and deep water there
just off the rock. Margaret put on her suit
and swimming cap, and dived off. I stood
and watched her swimming, oh twenty feet down.
I never had seen anything so pretty,
and I never have since.

                    We sat awhile in silence,
man and man, and soon the others came
from the kitchen, to rescue us each from the other.
I was asked, later that evening, how confused
he'd been, and had to answer truthfully: I
had met a man in his right mind, and clear as a bell.

He died about two weeks after, deep in Florida.
I try to remember him, but I cannot find his face;
when I try, I see Margaret, eighteen and strong,
long of arm and back, dividing Wisconsin waters:
from where I stand on the open rock, I find only
that June sun, low in the east, rising forever.