Late in the Evening
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
If you have any thoughts about this
poem, Lee Evans would like
to hear them
