My Life

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.

Copyright Credit: Mark Strand, “My Life” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand.Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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