Pooetry on Mondays: Anne Carson

Her Beckett

Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a play 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.