Still Memory by Mary Karr

What I first noticed about this poem are that the pictures that Karr create are very vivid. I can see the bed flying down a river towards an old house. I can hear a father banging into a busy kitchen, smell the coffee "smoky odor," and feel the cold bathroom tiles on my feet. I can also feel the pain that Karr is trying to portray. She does this easily by the use of foreshadowing, saying things like "my father in the doorway, not dead" at the beginning, then continuing her story until she brings it up again at the end. This makes me feel that nostalgia and that ache for the way life used to be. It's as though she is looking back at the good memories which are now overshadowed by the bad. The nostalgia also comes in the way she makes those pictures, remembering every little detail about that life. She acknowledges the simplicity of the life by describing the town around her and the everyday life. Karr's poem also gives a nostalgic, trying hard to remember the past, in the way that there are times when a line/ thought is finished in the next stanza as though she is trying hard to remember that time.

But Karr's main point in the poem is that when tragedy happens ( like parents dying), a person has to find a way to preserve the happy memories from before instead of being crushed by the present. This is shown in her line about how her sister is jumping across the bathroom tiles because they "are cold and we have no heat other than what our bodies can carry." The heat is happiness and the present is cold so we have to carry from the past our happiness. That is probably reading WAY too much into it, but that just jumped out at me.

Anyway, the way Karr seems to say to preserve those memories is to write them down, and that deep, realistic dreams are a way to enact that happiness.

On a beautiful cloudy Sunday, I was absolutely thrilled to feel such heartaches, and then discover a hopeful way to relive the happy memories.