No Days Without Meaning
It just drains back in, the fluid, with her legs propped up
on pillows at night, the swelling gone down by morning.
This is acceptable she thinks and won’t be needing a
doctor anytime soon. What can one do anyway about heart
failure, barring transplant, and she wouldn’t want that
so she lives with it slowly. Takes the stone steps one at a time.
Tries not to knead the dough too tough since she gets tired.
Guadalupe without her Jesus. She is trying in sadness.
She stands to wash the dishes with plenty of suds and warm
water from the stove; it has cooled since the last fire.
Outside it is hot, inside also, and she perspires a little into her
brassiere which is shockingly worn and shabby. She is
simply grateful to be alive and believes there are no days
without meaning anymore. Her slippers flop flat on the tile
floor, her ankles refill with blood and her feet ache mostly
all day. She prays to the Virgin for strength all the time.
____________________
Nancy Christopherson
Review by Debra Kaufman
This poem’s strength lies in its attention to detail, its unflinching yet sympathetic gaze at a woman living painfully close to death. Though it’s told in third person, it is a close third person, as if the speaker lives with or near the elderly woman simply identified as “she.” We experience along with the speaker the woman’s fatigue and carefulness of movement, told directly and unsentimentally. This is no easy life: she “[t]akes the stone steps one at time” and heats water on a wood stove. Her feet “ache mostly/all day.” Despite her pain, or perhaps because of it, she believes “there are no days without meaning anymore.” It is poignant how she perseveres through small acts of courage and faith and the poet reveals this with grace and compassion.
Review by Zeke Sanchez
Clearly the woman in the poem has learned hard lessons about life. The key lesson is that she prays for strength to endure her suffering, not for the miracle cure. She is beyond believing, or asking, for miracle cures. “It is acceptable” that the swelling in her legs has gone down by morning. She has learned to live with her limitations, taking one stairstep at a time. Clearly the philosophy of this poem is that suffering teaches one about the meaning in life. The predictability and consistency of her physical suffering ensures that for this woman each day will bring revelations, meaning, to her life. This is a poem with a message encapsulated in a well-defined, if brief, description of a woman’s daily travails.
Review by Jared Pearce
This poem’s plainness generates its poignant power, which hammers-in that fantastic final line. I really like the last phrase because it touches all the points in the poem: the woman prays all the time, she wants strength all the time, everything is all the time, and all the meaning, we and the woman realize by the end, is zapping around all the time.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
A moving statement on the meaning of the word meaningful time. A last clause in the contract we entered into with existence. A last wave of the arm. Days lived on tiptoe, praying that gentleness might prolong our shelf life. Time extension.
According to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, gravity can slow down time in a phenomenon called gravitational time dilation (something that, for example, affects our GPS satellites and is accounted for in their programming). Time can also be slowed relative to others by descending into a gravitational well, which is what this poem captures so precisely. A gravitational well in all its mass and pull where every action is weighted and lived with extra care and purpose.
More mass = more detail = more care = more meaning = more pull = more time = win!
But it’s a trick, Montale will tell us (I bet you thought you’d never see the day when a poet could contradict a physicist in their own field – they don’t, but I like to imagine they could). Nevertheless, a good enough trick. In reality, we can only slow time relatively to someone else living in a different (lesser) gravitational field, a different, perhaps younger, lighter, perhaps more carefree version of ourselves. Still, good enough.
Some like to sip life, / others chug it down / but the bottle remains the same. / There’s no refilling once empty. (from Montale, Sooner or Later)
Review by William Welch
Christopherson’s portrait of this woman, evidently in failing health, is finely drawn and strikingly realistic. In sixteen lines, we learn about this woman for whom “there are no days / without meaning anymore.” The emotional core of this piece is about acceptance. Confronting her own mortality with grace and courage, this woman refuses either the precarious shelter of denial, or the emptiness of anger. By the final couplet, I have come to have great respect for her, and also have respect for Christopherson’s ability to construct such a moving, humane poem.