Standing Open-Mouthed Before the Department Realizing What Having Alzheimers Really Means

This mouth from which Demosthenes and Lenny Bruce
once jumped with equal frequency hangs open now,
a sagging factory door hung from a rusted hinge.
Inside, the floor is marred by stumps of broken bolts
that mark the grease streaked corners of machinery scars,
where something too big to be moved has been removed
nevertheless by some means Science cannot guess,
and dangling fixtures, wires that do not connect
hang in tangles and infrequent showers of sparks.
Thought slick as oiled silk’s rippling sheen was milled here once,
rolled out that door in bolts as big as forest logs
to waiting markets, and consumers thrilled to touch
such tight woven cloth, no torch could scorch nor knife mar,
in intricate designs only satellites could see.
How, between idea and the rising was the thread lost?
What silent bankruptcy sent midnight caravans
of moving vans to haul, silent as spent spiders,
that light-speed-flying-shuttle magic loom away?
How did the rust that clogs everything, even the air, silt in
unobserved for years, precipitate all at once?
What hoarfrost change of state made glass and water ice,
locked thought like lakes going over from freezing to frozen?
And what angstrom crevice  turning hairline crack split
so sudden into canyon deep forking fractures
of the unwordable, unfathomable,
but undeniable rupture’s realization.
©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS