A glass swan smashed by kittens is hardly a tragedy, yet in Bill Cody's "Minding the Store" it sets off a long chain of thought about how fragile love is. The poem opens mid-thought, in lowercase: "a little while, you will be here -". The line can be read as comfort or as warning, since "a little while" admits that the beloved's presence has limits. Everything that follows tests that uncertainty. The poem's central idea is that closeness and the fear of loss are bound together: the moments when the speaker feels most connected are the moments when losing the other person seems most possible.
The domestic details carry much of this feeling. The swan "was given to you / only yesterday," and the kittens have already broken it, along with "our last vase." The word "last" suggests that the speaker is running short of breakable, beautiful things. The poem then turns inward with "like myself:", which seems to compare the speaker to the broken objects, though the poem never spells the comparison out. Then comes the image of two people "on such a narrow / edge -". The line break leaves "edge" alone on its line, a small drop of its own. The next image is a dance: "we dance around each other's skin / to touch; peace, / our minds touch." The dancing is cautious, circling rather than colliding, and the semicolon followed by "peace" shows that touch is what steadies them.
The middle of the poem is its quietest and most inventive stretch. "We stored all our fears in the basement, / among the books & papers we have no use for." The title's "store" echoes here in "stored," and the echo changes the title's meaning. Minding a store means looking after it, but this couple is also minding their fears: shelving them out of sight, as if hidden things stayed harmless. The next move is to "lean, 1 on the other." Writing the numeral "1" instead of "one" makes the image look like a tally mark or an upright figure, but its meaning is plain. The two people hold each other up. The admission that follows, "i found i needed you," is the flattest line in the poem. After the broken glass and the edge, the speaker simply states a fact.
The longest sentence builds the poem's emotional center. It begins with a puzzle: "each time we have an argument, why is it -" and then delays the answer through a series of "after"s: "after i am sorry, / after we have gone to bed / as lovers, / after the tears & the sweat / of love, embracing". The repetition works like a staircase leading down, from apology to bed to tears, before the speaker arrives at "tell me why most often then / i see deepest into yr eyes." The surprise is that the deepest seeing comes after conflict and its repair, not in calm. Tension and tenderness feed each other, and the speaker asks the question without claiming to understand it.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Short lines, dashes and abrupt breaks give it the rhythm of someone thinking aloud and stopping to check themselves. The shorthand spellings, "&," "yr," "wd," make it read like a private note to the beloved. That fits the intimate address of the poem, though it is an impression from the text and not a fact about how the poem was made.
The ending does not settle anything. "this fear of leaving - / who wd be left behind, / & what wd be forgotten?" The poem never says whether the leaving is a breakup, a death, or something vaguer, and that openness works in its favor. The question about what would be forgotten is especially pointed, because it moves attention from the people to their shared small history: the swan, the vase, the arguments, the eyes. The poem's value lies in treating those ordinary things as worth guarding, and in admitting that guarding them cannot guarantee anything.