Crosswords by Richard Weaver

Each morning he’d walk to town
as my grandparents called it,
barely two blocks, stopping to say Hello
to the many merchants, neighbors, relatives,
and friends. Somedays we woke early enough
to walk with him, to be shown in town
as Tom's boys from Texas. We'd walk
behind his measured limp, one knee stiff,
a storied football memory. He always bought
two papers: the Birmingham News
and the Tuscaloosa News,
and read them without glasses
before settling in on the porch
with the puzzles. No one dared
attempt them before him. And he never
left them unfinished. No pencil for him.
Always the confidence of ink.
Only its permanence would do.
Nothing to do with dementia.
The brain is a muscle; he challenged it
daily to do its best, to do more.
Not a way to strengthen memory
or learn new tricks at an advanced age:
it was simply what he did, the way
today began after the sun appeared.
He’d learned the tricks, the odd words
and language quirks, and found ease
in knowing his life had not been left behind,
in a suitcase or attic; his mind alive even though
the anvil of his body was daily shrinking.



Post-Covid, Richard Weaver has returned as the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Among his other pubs: conjunctions, Louisville Review, Southern Quarterly, Free State Review, Hollins Critic, Little Patuxent Review, Loch Raven Review, The Avenue, and New Orleans Review. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and wrote the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005). Recently, his 180th prose poem was published. He was a finalist in the 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry.