Neurofibrillary Tangle

“Dilly-dilly,” is what you said to me
as we rode the cable car down Bay Street
to Fisherman’s Wharf; I should have known
then that those words meant something deeper
in their nonsense, a spoken symptom
of what was to come in the next few years,
but how was I to know at age thirteen
that behind your Coke-bottle glasses
those chocolate brown eyes which held
memories of Teamster competitions
and tanks plowing Korean terrain
would turn childlike, glassy with loss,
would steadily begin to forget
where you misplaced your keys
or how to get to the grocery store,
until eventually they had to take away
your driver’s license entirely; I remember
when Mom walked into that cramped kitchen
and you asked Dad if he had a new girlfriend
as if it were nineteen seventy seven
and he was a mop-headed teenager
wearing the fringed leather jacket
I’d seen draped onto his lanky frame,
smiling in faded photographs hanging
along side the glass case which held
derby trophies and your Purple Heart—
she was heartbroken, more so than I
was when you mistook me for Dad’s son,
although I suppose it wasn’t your fault
that I donned a butch bomber jacket,
my hair cropped short, “making a statement,”
as I told Mom after I’d returned from the salon,
my sisters laughing at the whole situation
like Jason’s friends would laugh at his reception
when you unwittingly soiled your diapers
and Grandma had to rush you off the dance floor,
a lingering odor mingling with the smell
of wine barrels and bridesmaid’s sweat,
and I felt nauseated both by the smell
and the actions of my cousin’s college bros—
didn’t Jason remember that you and Grandma
raised him like a son, that you were his father figure;
nine months would pass and I’d get a call from Mom,
you’d just had a stroke and Dad
was on the next flight to Oakland,
and while he grew closer with each visit
I felt myself pulling away until I was a planet
and you were a shooting star, your sepia skin
wrinkled like when my sisters and I spent too much
time in the bathtub when we were young,
your chocolate eyes still shining
among deepened crow’s feet while Dad’s,
the exact shade as yours,
dimmed with your last breath.