When I read "bright beads and jumpers", I thought this might lead onto an optimistic poem about the serenity ad joy of old age, but in fact it is the opposite. The bright colours are swiftly undermined by the word "Grey" which opens the second stanza. These women have no purpose, no function; their (deceased) husbands "tidied away", and they have nothing to do but waste what time remains in chatter and knitting. Hesketh calls their talk "shavings", emphasising its ephemeral nature and lack of significance. The widows' time is "mortgaged" which makes us think of the phrase "borrowed time". It's not the approach of death that I find so bleak and terrifying in this poem, though - it's the emptiness of their existence. They only pick up some knitting for "makeweight meaning". it make it seem as if nothing they do or say has any real significance.
The phrase "knives and forks are grips upon existence" creates an image of the widows with white knuckles, gripping cutlery unnecessarily tightly, in an effort to remind themselves that they are in fact still alive - unlike Mrs Porter, who has "ceased". Interesting that the word "died" is avoided - it makes me wonder whether I should look at these widows as already being in some way dead. They seem to have no meaning; there is no point to them. Will their physical death be no more than a "cessation"? In fact, I end up feeling rather angry on their behalf; the poem dismisses them so categorically as things shrivelling away, and yet they are still human beings. They do have some sort of togetherness at the end, as they "draw closer together" and I find myself hoping that they will now talk properly to one another, and not just deal in "shavings" while they still have time. The poem is undoubtedly bleak, and it leaves me feeling that this is not the way their - or our - lives should end.
In the Basement of the Goodwill Store*
In musty light, in the thin brown air
of damp carpet, dolls’ heads and rust,
beneath long rows of sharp footfalls
like nails in a lid, an old man stands
trying on glasses, lifting each pair
from the box like a glittering fish
and holding it up to the light
of a dirty bulb. Near him, a heap
of enamelled pans as white as skulls
looms in the catacomb shadows,
and old toilets with dry red throats
cough up bouquets of curtain rods.
You’ve seen him somewhere before.
He’s wearing the green leisure suit
you threw out with the garbage,
and the Christmas tie you hated,
and the ventilated wingtip shoes
you found in your father’s closet
and wore as a joke. And the glasses
which finally fit him, through which
he looks to see you looking back –
two mirrors which flash and glance –
are those through which one day
you too will look down over the years,
when you have grown old and thin
and no longer particular,
and the things you once thought
you were rid of forever
have taken you back in their arms.
Ted Kooser
