She carried a heavy load, but her life was not a story. It had no center. Everything in it mattered. Things alone and things together. Her own smell. In time, the right husband at the right time. A wedding ring on the left-hand finger. Her dead father's memory swimming like goldfish in her milky sleep. Everything counted. The red truck across the street. Her unworn red dress. Sad, lonely people with acerbic wit. Mean and nice servants. First sentences. Plotless dinner parties. The great space called Life. September in Spain. Secrets -- "I would die if anyone reads these words." Windows looking out from dark rooms. Taste, smell, touch, thought. She counted everything. She counted on things being in their places. Believed in everything -- the journey of sperm cells swimming for survival inside other women. Fit, she accepted herself. Survival of the fittest. Believed in her dreams. Though there was no center to anything, everything counted. The cost of underwear. The sound of trees. The color of underwear. What she wore. Her student fees. The right nursing home for her dying mother. Her mother's smell. Her mother's swollen ankles. Everything. All of it. The hungry in India. The told and the untold. Untold millions dying. The dying in Africa. The dying in America, dying without design. Without line, or reason, it all added up, counted, meant something somehow. Yet, in detail after detail, while she carried the weight of her life, the pieces refused to fit together. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HOW MY HEART SINKS by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON THE CAMBODIAN BOX by KAREN SWENSON DEEP IN THE NIGHT by SARA TEASDALE ALICE IN WONDERLAND: THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER by CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON TO A CERTAIN CIVILIAN by WALT WHITMAN |