Goodbye 1st quarter :)

Still Memory

Mary Karr

The dream was so deep

the bed came unroped from its moorings,

drifted upstream till it found my old notch

in the house i grew up in,

then it locked in place.

A light in the hall-

my father in the doorway, not dead,

just got home from the graveyard shift

smelling of crude oil and solvent.

In the kitchen, Mother rummages through silver

while the boiled water poured

in the battered old drip pot

unleashes coffee's smoky odor.

Outside,the mimosa fronds, closed all night,

poen their narrow valleys for dew.

Around us, the town is just growing animate,

its pulleys and levers set in motion.

My house starts to throb in its old socket.

My twelve-year old sister steps fast

because the bathroom tiles

are cold and we have no heat other

than that what our bodies can carry.

My parents are not yet born each

into a small urn of ash.

My ten-year old hand reaches

for a pen to record it all

as would become long habit.

There are some memories that people will NEVER forget, and I could imagine that for Mary Karr she would never forget her journey through writing. At the end of the poem when she says, "My ten-year old hand reaches for a pen to record it all as would become long habit", I would imagine that this was one of those "Kodak memories" that can never be erased. Parts of the poem were a little dark for my liking. She tends to talk about her parents using cold words like "dead", I guess why i think those are cold is because growing up my parents always had us use the saying "passing away" because it sounds less abrupt.

This poem was a direct look into the life of Karr, with all the details even to the little things like dew that most of us wouldn't notice. Memories are those final looks into a past time, whether they are good or bad, those memories seem to stick with us for our lifetime. The first time I picked up a microphone or sang would be the equivalent (I feel) to her way of writing. While peoples passions are different, we all have the availability to let that passion come through... and what better way than through rummaging through our memories!