The more she strained her mother wit
To put the jigsaw into place,
The more the pieces wouldn’t fit.
 
Too bad the cat had felt the need
To leap into the midst of things—
The puzzle would have been complete.
 
Somehow she had misplaced the lid,
Which had a picture stamped on it
Of what she searched for in her head.
 
The work lay spread in front of her;
The shapes appeared and disappeared,
Each morphing into metaphor.
 
Sometimes they’d stay where they belonged—
But then, to her weak eyes, it seemed
She’d put them all together wrong.
 
She kept on shuffling scattered bits;
Meanwhile a lifetime passed beneath
Her aged, trembling fingertips.

*****

Lee Evans writes: “This particular poem arose from the year-long habit my wife and I have of doing jigsaw puzzles. (Big surprise!) In such circumstances one gets to thinking a lot about putting the pieces of one’s life together, especially those of us who are in our mid seventies. I may have stolen the title from a Paul Simon song, but that has nothing to do with it. Several people I have known have suffered from dementia late in life, but the poem is more about trying to grasp fluid realities than dementia, and attempting this in the frailty of one’s declining years. But that’s not all there is to the poem…”

‘Late in the Evening’ was first published in Snakeskin.

Lee Evans was born in Annapolis, Maryland and worked for the Maryland State Archives. Having retired to Bath, Maine, he worked for the local YMCA and retired from there. He has self-published 13 books of poetry, which can be found on Amazon and Lulu.com. He occasionally puts poems on a blog, The Road and Where It Goes  (Formal purists should be forewarned that he has written a fair amount of free verse!)

Photo: “Cosmo Helping with Jigsaw Puzzles – 2020” by cseeman is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.