April 18
April 18 - meaning Summary
Memory Buried with the Past
The poem confronts memory, decay and the erasure of a future through stark bodily and natural images. The speaker describes past experiences rotting in the skull and imagines physiological causes that might make her forget someone. Small domestic and bodily details underscore emotional detachment, while final images—grass, sky, a lost tennis ball—capture a quietly catastrophic sense that a potential future has vanished irretrievably.
Read Complete Analysesthe slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull and if my stomach would contract because of some explicable phenomenon such as pregnancy or constipation I would not remember you or that because of sleep infrequent as a moon of greencheese that because of food nourishing as violet leaves that because of these and in a few fatal yards of grass in a few spaces of sky and treetops a future was lost yesterday as easily and irretrievably as a tennis ball at twilight
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