Carrie
by Ted Kooser
"There's never an end to dust
and dusting," my aunt would say
as her rag, like a thunderhead,
scudded across the yellow oak
of her little house. There she lived
seventy years with a ball
of compulsion closed in her fist,
and an elbow that creaked and popped
like a branch in a storm. Now dust
is her hands and dust her heart.
There is never an end to it.
I love the symbol of dust being life and death. Life in that there is "...never and end to dust and dusting". Life goes on. Dust is life and you just keep living or dusting it. In death, "...dust is her hands and dust her heart". We are made of dust and to dust we return. It is a never ending cycle. "There is never an end to it."
Thanks for this analysis, Liz. I love this poem. When the dust gets equated with death (dust to dust), I feel as if the cleaning is the way we deal with death. We keep dusting, trying to clean death away so that we can stand to keep on living. Cleaning keeps sadness and maybe also horror at bay. Nancy
ReplyDeleteI really like this poem. It brought me right back to my childhood with various aunts whose busy hands I can still see cleaning their already pristine homes, practically every time I visited them. Perhaps it really is okay to live one's entire life doing nothing more than maintaining our various compulsions, no matter how banal they seem. This poem is written in the style I enjoy most. I'm glad you shared it.
ReplyDeleteLisa