ANNE CARSON

"Her Beckett"

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Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by

                                                                                  Beckett.

   You know that sense of sinking through crust,

         the low black oh no of the little room

            with walls too close, so knowable.

Clink and slow fade of toys that belong in memory

   but wrongly appear here, vagrant and suffocated

         on a page of pain,

            Worse

         she says when I ask.

   And as in Beckett some high humor grazes

her eye—

         “we went out rowing on Lake Como”—

              not quite reaching the lip.

                  Our love, that half-mad firebrand,

         races once around the room

   whipping everything

and hides again.