“Senior Living”
Sometimes it seems like a Dantean limbo
of the walking dead—the bent at 90 degrees,
the shaking whose forks trip on the way
to their lips, the halt who shuffle tortoise-pace,
and those whose maladies escape
naming—the tongue rolled upwards
spasmodically filling a mouth,
like pink porridge in a pot
rising over and over to a boil.
Sometimes it feels like
the theater of redemption.
Here, in the crepuscular hour,
where skin gathers
on the face in crepey folds,
hair withers like leaves
revealing bareness underneath,
I rush to carry a new friend’s
laden plate from the buffet
while she Rollators back to our table;
I offer her my water
when the waiter’s late.
Here HELLO! follows Hi!
Everyone greets unknown others
in the halls—like bonded passengers
in the same relentless boat, traversing
the pitch-dark river.
*
Moment, Registered
On a stark strange-to-us
persistently clouded day
in our new still alien
senior home we don’t yet
call home, my husband,
with his sieve memory, and I—
bundled in the “winter clothes”
once kept at the back of our closets
“back home in California”—
hold gloved hands for a short walk.
Just ahead of us on the path,
a chubby gray squirrel
velvet-white of chest sprints
down a brown grassy hill and leaps
into a bare tree, balancing
on a jiggling twig-thin branch.
We both watch, but only I file.
Then the round bundle bounds up
into the air again, springing
from one bouncing spindly limb
to another, as if for the sheer green
glee of it—like a kid on a trampoline—
and my husband claps his hands.
Joy! For the present-minded,
even among the beasts.
If not in my heart
just yet.
*
Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One (Jacar Press), ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025). Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside. In another life, she produced scholarship on her English Renaissance loves, George Herbert, John Donne, and Shakespeare, including King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke UP, 1998).