Poem for Mom

I heard this poet, Kay Ryan, on KCTS just a few days after the memorial. I don't have cable so I watched a lot of The Yankee Workshop and This Old House during the soap opera hours. I had been just floored by the Jane Kenyon poem Steve read at the memorial so when they started interviewing Kay Ryan I stopped flipping and listened. The poem follows and I love it. It makes me tear up a little. Her whole book (The Niagara River) is wonderful - short, simple, amazing little gems of thought that are so personal and so universal.

Things Shouldn't be so Hard
by Kay Ryan

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space -
however small -
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't
be so hard.