Classic Poem

That’s what you say a hundred times a day.
Yet we keep asking.
(“How was your morning? Did you like the nurse?”)
The worse you get, the louder we keep asking—
as though, if you heard better, you could say.

Two adjectives bob up sometimes, depending.
Good things you call “amazing.”
(“How was the garden? Did you like the birds?”)
Things are either “terrible” or “amazing.”
Nothing is in the middle. It’s the ending,

the drawn-out ending, of your verbal life.
“It’s hard to say,”
you say, as though by thinking you’d remember
your sentence: word by word, there’s less to say.
This man here is your son. I am his wife,

and it is, indeed, terrible and amazing
you need to be told again.
I know you, though—that undimmed politesse
of eighty-plus years when, awestruck again
by a too-brilliant question, you sit there gazing

thoughtfully into space, and only then
do you say the terrible thing. “It’s hard to say.”

from Poetry Northwest, New Series, Vol. VI, no. 1. Used with Permission.