Still Memory

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 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 smokey odor.
Outside, the mimosa frond, closed all night,
open their narrows 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 te 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.

So with this poem I didn't really understand it until I learned the background information on the author. After learned about her the meaning of the poem was pretty straight forward.
The different parts of the poem represented many different memories of the people in her life.
So "my father in the doorway, not dead,
just home from the graveyard shift
smelling of oil and solvent." just showed the image of the author's father in her memories. She did the same with her mother:
"In the kitchen, Mother rummages through silver
while the boiled water poured
in the battered old drip pot".
In the last stanza she writes:
"My ten-year-old hand reaches
for a pen to record it all
as would become long habit." So during the classes discussion we learned that she had started writing about that age.