Flirtation with Daphne

by Russell Rowland

Mornings when she remembers,
Daphne shuffles out her door
in Assisted Living, negotiates
the elevator to the Bistro floor,
tremulously fills a coffee cup.

Memories of Wellesley College,
the Squam Lakes Association,
the Sandwich Sewer Commission,
have faded from her cortex, like
a snowman caught in April sun.

The hours of her day are a house
of cards, then a column of figures
that won’t add; sequences of plans
painstakingly noted down for later;
then notes mislaid amid the clutter.

Daphne, as I encounter her today,
doesn’t recall me from yesterday—
yet assumes the best of somebody
who greets her by name. In such
shifting sands is friendship sown.

I flirt and tease a smile out of her.
Maybe she hears faintly the father
of her daughter, and smiles at him,
hands his teasing right back again;
love being the last thing we forget.