TIP

MARJORIE MADDOX

of the tongue

not tickling the undiscovered decay;

of the finger, stubbed into silence;

of the #2 pencil, poised and pointed,

suddenly stifled, its nonpoisonous lead

unable to undo any tabula rasa—mine or yours

or my mother’s, who keeps asking with the tongue

and the finger and the blank slate

of her almost ninety-year-old face,

“How old?  How old?”

How old this silence that faces

the poised, the stubbed mother tongue—

yours, mine—blank as any tabula rasa

before words knew how to rise,

or fingers how to point at the poisonous,

the decayed, or merely the undiscovered

hiding behind the stifled face,

ninety #2 pencils unable to answer

such sudden questions.

How to answer what tickles the stubbed mind,

undo the poisonous—yours, mine—

face the tabula rasa without pencil or tongue,

the blank of silence its own discovery of decay,

the pointed “How old? How old?” suddenly stifled,

leading back to the undoing: blank slate

where ninety keeps asking after itself

as the finger points in question, and the poised

tongue raises again its unanswered

Tip

"Tip" was previously published in Southern Florida Poetry Review and in the poetry collection Seeing Things (Wildhouse, 2025). 

This poem, the first I wrote during a Fall 2018 writing residency, tumbled out the evening that I arrived, the process “tipping” me into a “tip of the tongue” space that writing often pushes through. This time, the process provided insight into the early stages of my mother’s dementia. What, I wondered, did it feel like to her when words became evasive at a more extreme level than common “tip of the tongue” syndrome? “Tip” thus paved the way to other poems on dementia, caregiving, and the shifting roles of memory that eventually became the book Seeing Things (Wildhouse, Feb. 2025).