A photo of someone else’s childhood,
a garden in another country,—world
he had no part in and has no power to imagine:

yet the old man who has failed his memory
keens over the picture—‘Then happy days—
gone—gone for ever!—glad for moment to suppose

a focus for unspent grieving, his floating
sense of loss.
He wanders

asking the day of the week, the time,
over and over the wrong questions.
Missing his way in the streets

he acts out
the bent of his life,
the lost way

never looked for, life
unloved, of which he is dying
very slowly.

‘A man,’
says his son, ‘who never
made a right move in all his life.’ A man

who thought the dollar was sweet and
couldn’t make a buck, riding the subway
year after year to untasted sweetness,

loving his sons obscurely, incurious
who they were, these men, his sons—
a shadow of love, for love longs

to know the beloved, and a light goes with it
into the dark mineshafts of feeling…A man
who now, without knowing,

in endless concern for the smallest certainties,
looking again and again at a paid bill,
inquiring again and again, ‘When was I here last?’

asks what it’s too late to ask:
‘Where is my life? Where is my life?
What have I done with my life?’