A Malady They Say

I am sometimes someone else to her,
She calls me by a nephew’s name,
then asks why I never come around.
 
She stops mid-sentence, points, and asks me
to call a visitor who just passed
the door, a relative, now long dead.
 
Her day is a tapestry of giggles,
there is no plot in the TV show,
only laughter, the clink of plates
 
as actors eat, a grin on the screen
draws out her own; she pats a chair for
me to share in her moment, her meal.
 
It is a malady, they say, one only those
around her suffer from. But in the room—
clinking, giggling, mistaking faces.
 
It is a life to envy: though bed-bound,
she swims in the care of faces now strange,
when she sleeps, it is a sleep to watch.