Personification

"Still Memory" 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 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.