(Untitled) by laura morgan

Trying to figure it out.

Sitting at the kitchen table
trying to figure out what I have to show for all these years of living.

Mind ponders, and I peer across the sitting room.
Peer out the window
through hazy sheer
where
propane gas cylinders stand side by side
all sage green and rusty red on a truckbed

beautiful to me,
shocking white cautionary flammable gas warning and all.

All is quiet, and I sit, 
seized by the irony

of a life-sized still-life not wholey unlike my memories:
forty-six years of foggy recollections

caustic
and beautiful.

from The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

My next thought was that she was being cagey because she feared me, or was even perhaps in dread of speaking, in case it led her back to things she would rather forget. Of course either way I know she has suffered enormously. You can see it in in her eyes as plain as day. It is actually what gives her her strange grace, if I may say that.

from The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them.