Poetry Response #2- Still Memory by Mary Karr

Still Memory

By: 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 home form 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,

open 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 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.

     The poem "Still Memory" by Mary Karr is portrayed as dream that is looking at stored away memories. She used, "the bed came unroped from its moorings, drifted upstream till it found my old notch" almost as a metaphor to explain how far back these memories come from. That the bed was released and went so far back until it found that one memory to open up again. She does a great job at letting us see, taste, and feel everything that is going on around her in this specific memory. She goes back to when her parents were still alive, back to the house she grew up in. She is ten-years-old and that was when she began to write down thoughts, memories, or ideas or order for her to become a writer in the future. Karr greatly uses adjectives in order for us to basically "walk through" the memory as well. The poem not only shows a memory of the past but also has an insinuation as to what they future is like for her now.

Memories: A beautiful sight ♥