Aphasia is the loss of the ability to use or understand language, and Michael Waltuch's poem never stops to define it. Instead it lets sentences behave the way the word suggests. Thoughts start confidently and drift off, images arrive without warning, and the reader is left to work out what connects them. The poem's central idea, as I read it, is that when language fails, what disappears is not only words but the shared sense of a world those words held together. What remains is a set of social reflexes, small talk and euphemism, that cannot hide how much has gone.
The opening lines establish that sense of depletion. "That gradual cadence" suggests speech slowing down, a rhythm winding toward silence, and the result is "the feeling that nothing remained / to be said." There is a bitter irony here, because the poem is saying this in fluent, even ornate phrasing. Words like "harbinger," "panacea" and "extrapolations" belong to a vocabulary of confident explanation. Yet each is attached to something that doesn't quite hold. A "harbinger / of colder and more desolate fortunes" announces a future the speaker can only guess at.
The one line of reported speech, "She buys more socks," is the poem's most striking moment. It is flat, domestic, and oddly cheerful, and the speaker mocks its attempt at comfort: "As if that sudden switch / to the present tense were a panacea." The poem doesn't say who "she" is, but the line reads like a stab at normality, a plain, solid sentence thrown across a gap. Its failure is the point. The "glum architecture" it is meant to brighten turns out to contain not just "dark corners / but also those which already were / bright as day." Decline shows up even in places that were never gloomy, so cheerfulness and sadness become hard to tell apart.
Form carries much of the meaning. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the sentences are often unfinished. "Which was the least of my extrapolations" hangs from nothing, a relative clause with no main thought to attach to. The two ellipses, after "architecture" and after "shore leave," act like the pauses of someone reaching for a word. Line breaks do similar work: "a harbinger" sits alone at the end of a line, so the reader has to wait for what it announces. Midway, the poem's one piece of jargon gets its own sharp label: "a slowness and a marked tendency / to fatigue, that generous euphemism." The adjective "generous" is pointed. It suggests the speaker distrusts the gentle, clinical language used for a hard reality. Then comes the casual idiom "took the cake," which jolts the tone. The poem keeps colliding registers, formal with colloquial, as though the right word and the nearest word were constantly swapping places.
The imagery grows stranger as the poem goes on. "The thickets, their self-indulgent fragments, / confronted my blazer" turns broken speech into undergrowth that snags a formal jacket. It is a comic and slightly painful picture of a composed person caught in tangled language. The first-person "my" suggests a speaker personally involved, though the poem never says whether they are the one affected or the one watching. "Tag ends of arguments aimed at nothing at all" captures speech that keeps its shape (the rise and fall of a quarrel) but has lost its target. The "few belongings bearing the tattered emblem / of too much shore leave" add a nautical note. The poem doesn't explain it, but the image suggests things worn out by being cut loose from their anchor.
The ending is the most daring choice: "the yoyos grinning near the horizon." Yoyos rise and fall and always return, which might echo the circling of failed speech, and "grinning" gives toys a face that seems indifferent to everything before it. Whether this is a last flash of absurd comfort or a final sign that logic has dissolved, the poem refuses to say. That refusal is why it stays with you. Rather than describing what losing language feels like, "Aphasia" makes the reader experience a little of it: the grasp for meaning, the near-sense of each phrase, and the odd brightness of what is left over.