Can anyone explain to me what this poem is about---A Life by Sylvia Path?

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,


This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.


Here's yesterday, last year ---


Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast


Windless threadwork of a tapestry.





Flick the glass with your fingernail:


It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir


Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.


The inhabitants are light as cork,


Every one of them permanently busy.





At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.


Never trespassing in bad temper:


Stalling in midair,


Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.


Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy





As Victorian cushions. This family


Of valentine faces might please a collector:


They ring true, like good china.





Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.


The light falls without letup, blindingly.





A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle


About a bald hospital saucer.


It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper


And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.


She lives quietly





With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,


The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture


She has one too many dimensions to enter.


Grief and anger, exorcised,


Leave her alone now.





The future is a grey seagull


Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.


Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,


And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,


Crawls up out of the sea.

Can anyone explain to me what this poem is about---A Life by Sylvia Path?
I hesitate to answer but I think it sounds like she is looking at a painting or a picture "here is today last year" and the different sharp images dont move they are still and "light as cork" I also suppose it could be a memmory relived too I dont know for sure but I enjoyed very much reading it
Reply:honestly i think it is just describing different sounds and actions. but others may dissagree