Listen, woolly afternoon, you’ve
wound around our fingers once

too often. I’ve tried to unravel her
strands of words, but her stories rarely verge

on solvable, instead mingling
timelines, places and languages

in some beautiful
but useless

confusion.

*

I try to follow one track
of story, only to discover

knitting or biscuits – and she never knitted
though they’d tell her

it befit her; a trap
for the elderly she’d

eagerly evaded.

*

Well. When she’s quicker and
looser I may try

and ask her,
but it’s all tangled now,

she says of her head,
before her tongue is tied.