The reading lamp beside his easy chair
is lit, its tassels wreathed by cigar smoke
rising from an abalone shell. Poised there
like whitecaps, waves of paper wrappers poke
from their empty box of butterscotch cremes.
The latest Life is spread like a doily
across the soiled chairback where his head seems to have been.

Shut drapes suggest it may
be winter, although there is no steaming glass
of Lipton tea, no black cardigan, no
plaid covered flask of brandy.
Time will pass
without changing the life these objects show,
caught between a time his memory sits
within and a shape his lost image fits.