Is there anything like the exactitude of poetry? Incisions into mental awareness are slabbed out in single words to form line, then stanza. When Keats writes "When the melancholy fit shall fall/ Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud..."  It means more than sound, it means that precise feeling of melancholy. And yet poetry at its diametric pole is also expansive, infinite. "It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love," wrote Joy Harjo of poetry's power. Poetry has unmet boundaries of possibility.

Isobel Egan's "Occulus" is one of her many ceramic works that echo architecture and create space for mental compartmentalization. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Engraved on the page, perhaps, but poetry is more than lapidary utterances. It can both pin down and embrace all of something unseen, undeveloped, and unfelt. A poet summons words to describe emotions that are on the edge of forming, yet must be called into being. Like a mind slipping away from itself in something as singular as a mother.

Mexican poet Coral Bracho (Born May 22, 1951) is the author of half a dozen collections of poetry, but her most personal - and more humanitarian wisdom - comes to us in It Must Be a Misunderstanding, poetry of her mother's Alzheimer's.

She knows that she knows, and she knows
that she doesn't know.
What isn't known shows up
with its slim, sharpened harpoons,
with its secret knots, its cynical,
quivering wire
made from dints,
from spall,
from blows of uneasiness; what she knows
leans out
over the dome of what happens,
and she just barely discerns
something
along that trajectory, among those shadows.

The poetic perspectives dance between Bracho's own and what she sees and intuits her mother seeing. Metaphors include darkness and light, house as a mind, and of course, the sharpened harpoon of knowledge and unknowing, uselessly skewering yielding air.

The house revolves
and each room is new
when she enters. She knows
- or pretends to know - that those rooms are hers,
and that she's
the hostess who must show them, again
and again, so they can be shared, touched,
and freshly forgotten: again
and again.

The mental capacity of someone with Alzheimer's - bitter attempts at fragment reconciliation - is well suited to poetic stanzas and rhythm. Bracho captures the movement of the person with the illness and yet shows stasis as the illness forces the body into an infinite circle of knowing and unknowing.

She approaches me wanting to tell me
that I. And then she stops telling me.
You never know the story, someone explains.
One sparrow, and suddenly they all descend
swarming the root of everything.

I'm going to wait here, see if someone comes by
who can tell me how to get back. Or see if they
want to guide me .

The victims of dementia are unwilling apostates of their own mental clarity. "This disease slips you away a little bit at a time and lets you watch it happen." wrote Terry Pratchett in his gut-twisting essay on dementia, "Alzheimer's is me unwinding. Losing trust in myself." 

The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams, instructed Gaston Bachelard, a mid-20th century philosophical mind who placed our most acute emotional memories in physical and conceptual space. Bachelard supposed that the more firmly affixed our memories to physical things, the stronger they are. Bracho summons a mental clarity that is lost in reality but found in memory and dreams. She affixes it to the exact word and verse.

Which thread is the one that tells our story
and lends us substance
when there's no trajectory
by which to make sense of ourselves?
Which thread are we sure is vital?
The one that, maybe, ties together the handful of gestures
that comprise us; so we feel
we still have control. Gestures
that we repeat as certainties; that delineate
those certainties which once shaped us
and which now delimit
and nail us
to our shadows. Certainties
whose meaning and origin we don't know,
but which nevertheless enclose
and protect us, like dive helmets
or grilles;
which still let us look through them
into the world:
that disquieting, incomprehensible
strangeness.

Even so, I prefer Wislawa Szymborska's definition of poetry. "In Fact Every Poem" in which she writes: "In fact, every poem might be called 'Moment.'" Every perfectly chosen word, every expertly crafted line form a piece of something, a moment of insistence, a stepping in and then, through. 

Bracho's poems bear witness to this inexorable thing in the only way possible: she captures something and for a moment, holds it. Even the "sharpened harpoons of unknowing" are embraced. Are they blunted as well?

Imagine compartmentalizing your mindstuffs into physical space, ordered, contained, cold to the touch. Isobel Egan's "Miniature Spaces." Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

A mother suffering, a daughter witnessing, a disease progressing, and a body walking in endless circles. The collection's sharpest light is a poem that speaks of the void at the center of the circle, at the center of the disease: the loss of one's singular existence, our uniquely human gift, what Simone Weil so resolutely named "Ability to say 'I'". It is all we have and it is what is lost in this horrid illness. To speak one's own note, to know one's own self.

Sure, everything moves,
everything changes form, and place.
Everything loses
the outline that keeps it
to its particular space,
to its particular face, to the sound
that harbors its name; but a note
is something else altogether.
A note can't change.
A note is within you,
and if you sing it
wrongly, it will cringe
and everything is ruined.
It undoes everything.
That's what a note's like
and it has to be respected. A note is
what it is.

Egan's beautiful piece "Introspection II" invites us to trace its delicate walls and paths in search of mental clarity and order. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The experience of disease is one of fear, loss, and voids. Harpoons of bright yet sad knowings. It is also, especially with hereditary diseases like Alzheimer's, an experience of self. The lineaments of the mother are a double-helix in the daughter. "She knows that she knows, and she knows that she doesn't know." Could be said of the mother by her daughter; could be said of the daughter by herself.