Summary

“What Seems Like Joy” begins with the speaker posing the question of when is it time to “wash everything away and start over” (35). While they see the world changing around them, they feel no change taking place within themselves. They express a desire to “be shaken new like a flag whipping/away its dust,” however the monotony of time and experience leaves them wanting (35). The speaker then shifts to a memory of their father working in the garden, recalling his words, “if you’re not happy in your own yard/you won’t be happy anywhere” (35). The speaker says they have never had a yard, but they have had apartments that have required such laboring. They think of the people who die every day and blissfully “charge out of this world” while the speaker still remains, “lurching into [their] labor” (35).

In “Best Shadows...