Elegy For a Friend with Alzheimer’s

Your memory was sent ahead

of you to the land of Orcus

--the spool of all you are, to yourself, erased,

though not to us.

This is as good as addressing the dead.

Your body’s a blood hound baying, the scent lost

at that last river. Dumb, but tell Mnemosyne,

or the boss of Lethe,

or whatever god’s your final host,

that my heart’s a clenched fist.

You are a man alive dearly missed.

Greg Delanty’s latest books are The Greek Anthology, Book XVII and Collected Poems 1986-2006 (Carcanet Press).