American Life in Poetry

Sun., May 25, 2014

Ted Kooser U.S. Poet Laureate

Peter Everwine is a poet whose work I have admired for many years. Here is a poem about an experience many of us have shared. Everwine lives in California, but what happens in this poem happens every day in every corner of the world.

After the Funeral

We opened closets and bureau drawers

and packed away, in boxes, dresses and shoes,

the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue.

We sorted through cedar chests. We gathered

and set aside the keepsakes and the good silver

and brought up from the coal cellar

jars of tomato sauce, peppers, jellied fruit.

We dismantled, we took down from the walls,

we bundled and carted off and swept clean.

Goodbye, goodbye, we said, closing

the door behind us, going our separate ways

from the house we had emptied,

and which, in the coming days, we would fill

again and empty and try to fill again.

Poem copyright Peter Everwine from “Listening Long and Late” (University of Pittsburgh Press 2013), and reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by The Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.