"A Room in the Past"--Ted Kooser

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill
with a morning light so bright
you can’t see beyond its windows
into the afternoon. A kitchen
falling through time with its things
in their places, the dishes jingling
up in the cupboard, the bucket
of drinking water rippled as if
a truck had just gone past, but that truck
was thirty years. No one’s at home
in this room. Its counter is wiped,
and the dishrag hangs from its nail,
a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist,
blue aprons of rain, my grandmother
moved through this life like a ghost,
and when she had finished her years,
she put them all back in their places
and wiped out the sink, turning her back
on the rest of us, forever.



I've linked to Kooser reading "A Room in the Past," which I find lovely and compelling. Throughout the poem, the grandmother is never presented head-on. She's seen peripherally, moving through life in housedresses of mist,/blue aprons of rain. In all of the chores that she completes--putting away the dishes, cleaning off the counters, wiping out the sink (the last thing I do when I clean my own kitchen)--her back is turned toward the rest of the family. Now that the light is bright and the room spotlit by sun, her kitchen and, by extension, her absence become more noticeable. What has defined her no longer contains her. Just as the mist is evaporated and the end of rain signaled by sun, she's quietly vanished. That metaphor of the dishrag....a dry leaf is particularly haunting to me.