Taking Mary Home

by Ann Giard-Chase

By the time they found him,

he was halfway down Elm Street.

She was bumping along in her wheelchair

hanging on for dear life

as he steered her – hell bent for leather

around the potholes and stones. (Google it!

It’s something about riding horses at breakneck speed). Anyway, he was eighty. It was November.

Snow was falling. Home was ten miles west

as the crow flies. He knew the way.

He escaped! the nurses exclaimed,

his bed empty as a sparrow’s nest in January,

Aunt Mary’s bed the same. It seems

Uncle John had had enough of institutional life:

the daily parade of pills, the watery mashed potatoes,

the vacant, bedrock stares of the Alzheimer patients

of whom his wife, my sweet Aunt Mary, was one.

In her heyday, she’d been the village seamstress, mended

the farmers’ overalls, stitched my prom gowns,

pinning the delicate tissue patterns to lustrous

yards of satin and chiffon, her feet flowing

back and forth on the iron treadle like small engines

until one day her memory floated away

to some unknown place and left her all alone –

a tiny bird singing in the darkness,

picking through the rubble, lost among the ruins.

Taking my Mary home is all he said

when they pulled up beside him in the van, lifted Mary

gently from her wheelchair and buckled him in

beside her. He never went home again

to his house in the village, to the cattle by the creek –

to the place his bones were always lonely for.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I imagine him

whistling a happy tune as he wheels Mary down the hill,

past the white-steepled church to their home. She rises.

She’s lovely as a bride. Their hands clasp together.

They’re ready for this. They hurry everywhere –

into the bend of gold light leaping across the galaxies, into

the luminous cradle of stars where they are born

over and over again in the slow and clamorous fires of eternity.