Still Memory by Mary Karr (Poetry Response 2)

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 by Mary Karr is a very good and interesting poem. Even though I have read in multiple times I do not quite understand the whole poem yet. Why does she mention it as a dream not, even though the title is called a Still Memory. What I though that was interesting about this poem was that even though the poem is called Still Memory there is actually a lot going on thorughout the poem and around the author. These were my first thoughts when I first read the poem.
Then as I contibnued reading and thinking deeply I noticed that the title of the poem is called Still Memory because the narrator of the poem is the one being still, while everthing else is moving on around her. The author does a good job with this peom and I actually enjoyed it more as i started thinking more about the poem and the meaning around the words. Even though the meaning of the poem is pretty obvious it is still a good poem because it makes me think of my own personal memories. I also liked the writing structure of the piece because it is a unique way of describing a memory with interesting word choice.
I enjoyed this poem more than I thought I would, and I am kind of liking poetry more now that I am starting to understand it better, but still dreading about having to write poetry. :)