Charles van Heck's Woodhull Journal

This past week I drove past the home of a couple that I briefly had known. Judy and Diane lived next door to me while I lived at a place I came to call Hermits Pond. The following is a poem I wrote for them. The poem deals with the early onset of Alzheimer’s Disease.

WordPress is a bit quirky when it comes to posting poems. It doesn’t allow for proper spacing between stanzas. I have placed asterisks where those breaks appear.

Memory and Loss

(For Diane and Judy)

**

There is something I forgot.

A peculiar silence fills me,

Spreading between thoughts

As silence does over fields

And woods with winter’s first

Whiteness clinging to browning

Blades of summer grasses

And dangling leaves on branches.

**

Do you remember that late August

By the lake when the earth colors

Deepened with the smell of coffee

And the woods were braided with

Silver light among leaf shadows?

We watched for bears while picking

Berries. On the north shore geese

Gathered to feed before migrating.

**

I too rise to take flight among shadows.

There are many empty, dark places

Where words or faces or keys

Are lost― caverns that swallow

The rhythms of stories, or the sound

Of names pronounced until they

Are vulnerable to forgetfulness

And oblivion repossesses them.

**

Do you remember our nights

On the porch in pine scented air?

We read Adrienne Rich’s poems,

And I think it was Gertrude Stein’s

Lifting Belly… or was it Q.E.D.?⸺

Knowing ourselves as lovers,

Attending each intertwined word as lovers.

There is something I forgot that I wanted

**

To tell you; something I have misplaced.

Do not close your eyes.  Hold me tightly

Against the dark before I fade. . .

Yes, yes. . .

We took our beauty in words and in embrace. . .

There is something I forgot. . .

**

From: STILL LIFE: OBSERVATIONS DURING INTERVALS by Charles van Heck Copyright © 2025 Charles van Heck

Photograph: Copyright © 2025 Charles van Heck