My Life

By Mark Strand b. 1934 Mark Strand

The huge doll of my body

refuses to rise.

I am the toy of women.

My mother

would prop me up for her friends.

“Talk, talk,” she would beg.

I moved my mouth

but words did not come.

My wife took me down from the shelf.

I lay in her arms. “We suffer

the sickness of self,” she would whisper.

And I lay there dumb.

Now my daughter

gives me a plastic nurser

filled with water.

“You are my real baby,” she says.

Poor child!

I look into the brown

mirrors of her eyes

and see myself

diminishing, sinking down

to a depth she does not know is there.

Out of breath,

I will not rise again.

I grow into my death.

My life is small

and getting smaller. The world is green.

Nothing is all.

Source: Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

Biography

Mark Strand is recognized as one of the premier contemporary American poets as well as an accomplished editor, translator and prose writer. The hallmarks of his style are precise language, surreal imagery, and the recurring theme of absence and negation; later collections investigate ideas of the self with pointed, often urbane wit. Named the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990, Strand’s career has spanned nearly four decades, and he has . . .

Continue reading this biography