That summer she hadn't struggled to support herself. The salt had done it for her when she was thirteen on the Great Salt Lake, afloat beneath her parents' wind-borne cries. Behind white cloud-doors, she saw life as a sort of railway flat through which she'd pass from daughter, to wife, to mother, each defined, a furnished room in which she could devise the person to fit that place. Now, almost thirty, divorced, and shut out from her faith, she stuffs her daughter's lunch with Hershey bars - bribes for acceptance and ham sandwiches. Her furniture giving no identity, she weeps at comments on her graduate papers - "Banal, your thinking's commonplace" - asks, "How should I think?" as if thoughts were dresses. The white garage doors close on her last resort - to be a child curled on the back seat, eyes shut, floating on a long night journey, the motor murmuring like parents' front-seat voices. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...REMEMBERED MUSIC; A FRAGMENT by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL DRIFTING by THOMAS BUCHANAN READ A DIRGE by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY THIRTY EIGHT. ADDRESSED TO MRS. H -- Y. by CHARLOTTE SMITH THE OLD MAN'S COMFORTS AND HOW HE GAINED THEM by ROBERT SOUTHEY THE MORAL FABLES: THE SWALLOW, AND THE OTHER BIRDS by AESOP INSTRUCTIONS, SUPPOSED TO BE WRITTEN IN PARIS, FOR THE MOB IN ENGLAND by MARY (CUMBERLAND) ALCOCK |