Emerson Eye Mind
Life of an American Word Scholar
For the Incarcerated Writer, Future, Past, and Present
“And I may dine at journey’s end
with Landor and with Donne.”
-William Butler Yeats
Now at the end
and you know it, you find the stub
of old pencil in a pants pocket.
End of an Old Man in a Dementia Ward
He calls himself
Doctor Blackhawk Eliot Lincoln
and disappears into a dream
where he is a river boatman
reading the river
from his chair by the window.
Then, he’s in the desert
again, wearing his long,
Arab-Jewish holy hair dangling
over a mountain cave, and a river
of voices
for the one Primal Man.
Continue reading End of an Old Man in a Dementia Ward by Dale Williams Barrigar