FRAMED
…for my father
To love a person with Alzheimer’s is to learn the song
in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.
– Arne Garborg
He spent years in the basement
at war against forgetting.
Scissors and tape were his weapons,
the conflict relentless,
his ability to recall
anything was vanishing.
He cut up hundreds of old photos,
following the lead of his demolished brain.
Anything he believed excess
he cut from the photo-
trees, cars, houses, the sky.
It was the people he was holding on to.
Like the cat pushing his whiskers into
the corners of walls,
my father rubbed against
the corners of his longing,
leaving a vague imprint of his losses,
the stain of the past he was trying to marshal.
Memories he was
not even aware were lost,
had been swept away.
The chosen were taped
somewhere into a cheap frame
he’d buy at the drug store across the street,
until he could no longer remember where it was.
If someone struck a match
in the trashed warehouse of his brain,
that person was cut from a photo
and taped into his new dwelling-
The Frame of the Familiar.
Everyone overlapped-
the newborn, the aged, the dead,
the teens, the young adults…
it made no difference
whether they had known one another or not,
as long as he thought
he might have known them from somewhere,
from some time now omitted.
To finish, he’d find a photo of himself,
the one person he was still sure he knew.
He’d hunt for a place
to tape himself
in this new world, part color,
part black and white, part sepia.
There were giant people, tiny people,
torn people, faded and stained people,
in this multi-colored person-scape
comprising only those folks
he “sort of” “seemed” to recognize,
even MLK, RFK, JFK, Anita Bryant
made it into a frame.
When a frame was completed
he would take it out to his knotty pine porch,
its walls covered with frames,
grab his Black &. Decker
and drill straight through the frame
and into the wall.
Done.
Onto the next.
He had discovered a way to resurrect
some inner joy,
but the imperative was
to tape securely
lest someone get separated
and forget their way back.
He tamed the rough, curled edges
of the old photos with Scotch-tape,
and brought generations together,
a congregation of the living
alongside their ghost kin,
a population of his own design
of faces remembered,
or faces
he thought he remembered.
John L. Stanizzi
John L. Stanizzi is the author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, Sundowning, POND, The Tree That Lights The Way Home, Feathers and Bones. Viper Brain, and SEE. John’s work has been widely published. Johnnie’s poems can be found in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Plainsong, The Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Tar River Review, PoetLore, Potomac Review, and many others. His creative nonfiction has been published in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, East Coast, After the Pause, Adelaide, Impspired, and many others. His poems have appeared widely in Italy with profound gratitude to his translator, and dear friend, Angela D’ambra. John has read at venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. He also coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut. A “teaching artist” for the national poetry recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud, John spent a decade with Poetry Out Loud. He is a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, a New England Poet of the Year, and Poet-in-Residence at Manchester Community College and in the Middletown Connecticut School District. In 2021, John was the recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Writing – Non-Fiction, granted to him by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Culture, and Diversity for work on his new memoir, Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned. His short CNF piece Pants was named by its publisher, Potato Soup Journal, “Best of 2022.” John taught literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut, for 26 years. He taught high school English and directed the theater program at Bacon Academy in Colchester, CT. for 24 years; Johnnie put up 42 plays in 24 years. Johnnie lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, CT.
