Still Memory

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 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,
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.

—Mary Karr

     This poem can be interpreted in many different ways.  The way I choose to was that Karr was in a dream about her childhood.  In the first stanza, she is describing how she entered the dream.  She compares her bed to a boat in lines two and three.  In the third line she says her bed drifted upstream, and normally things drift downstream.  I took this as she was going upstream because she was visiting her past, which she has already "sailed" by in life.  In the next stanza, Karr says where her dream took her.  It was her house she lived in as a child.  The following stanzas go on to describe her memories.  You can conclude that her family was poor.  In lines 23 and 24, she implies that her parents died later on in her life.  In the last stanza, she writes down her memories because she doesn't want to forget them and so she can revisit them later. Overall, I liked this poem.  I could really connect to it because I've had dreams that have reminded me of old memories.