The death of a mother alters forever a family's story of itself. Indeed,
it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. The
Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in
the wake of that loss. The title poem attempts three explanations of the
departure of a life from the earth--a physical account, a psychological
account, and a spiritual account. It is embedded in a long narrative
sequence that tries to state plainly the facts of the last days of the
mother's life, in a room that formerly housed a television, next to a
California backyard. The visual focus of that sequence, a robin's nest,
poised above the family home, sings in a kind of lament, giving its own
version of ways we can see the transformation of the dying into the
dead. In other poems, called "Arguments," two voices exchange uncertain
truths about subjects as high as heaven and as low as crime. Grief is a
problem that cannot be solved by thinking, but that doesn't stop the
mind, which relentlessly carries on, trying in vain to settle its
accounts. The death of a well-loved person creates a debt that can never
be repaid. It reminds the living of our own psychological debts to each
other, and to the dead. In this sense, the death of this particular
mother and the transformation of this particular family are evocative of
a greater struggle against any changing reality, and the loss of all
beautiful and passing forms of order.
