A smell of rain at midnight is enough to pull the speaker back to an August in "56 or 7," and that shaky date matters. This is memory as it really works, approximate and triggered by the senses. The boy comes home from 4-H camp to a house full of relatives gathered for a funeral he missed. From that first scene he is on the edge of the family, arriving late and told little. The poem is an elegy for the dead man it addresses as "you," apparently an older relative, though the poem never spells out the tie. It grows into a larger question: what does a family do with its madness, and who gets to write the account?
The answer the poem circles is paper. Bureaucratic language runs through it. The dead man was "a licensed vender" who paid "special fees," and the speaker pays "special fees" too, for "registrin and withdrawin and registrin at idaho state." Then comes the neat, bitter turn: "you are registerd these few years at mt mccaleb / cemetry." The word "registered" slides from the university to the grave, as if life were a series of enrolments ending in the last one. Elsewhere the speaker is shown "a card / punched full of holes" that "assures me death was quiet." The card is cold evidence, a form standing in for comfort. Its holes echo, grimly, in the grandmother's "head / punched full of holes for reassurance." The poem does not explain that line, but the repeated image links official records to damage done to the body or mind. The title, "The Keepin of Records," points the same way, and the closing line makes the verdict clear: "the record keepers are unwelcome."
The word "quiet" does the most work. At first it sounds consoling: "oh died you quietly / and at peace." By the end it has darkened. The family will "die quietly mad," and the "memory of our happenstance is quiet." Quiet comes to mean silenced, a family habit of not speaking. The "officials" who held the dead man at the state hospital in Blackfoot are "all gone," and what remains is a card and a shrug.
Against all this paper, the poem sets a few vivid, unfiltered pictures. Grandmother ("grama") lies "in a pink housecoat with one of the lenses / shattered in her glasses," reading, with "a great green ulcer on her leg." The shattered lens suggests a view that is already broken. The cousins have "made off with your / paintings," and the speaker has "none of their brashness to / console my head." The most painful moment comes when the dead man "knelt on our sidewalk and begged me to come, / promisin to not hurt me and i ran / afraid into the house." That child's flight is the guilty center of the poem. Everything else, the registering and fees and cards, can be read as the speaker's attempt to make up for it.
Form and sound support this. There is no rhyme, almost no punctuation, no capital letters at the start of lines, and lines break in the middle of phrases ("silver and / turquoise"), so the poem tumbles forward like talk. Dropped g's ("registrin," "promisin," "grovelin") give it a plain, spoken West, and "midnite" is spelled as casually as it would be in a note. The heavy phrases land flatly in this setting. "Mormon eruption has ill settled among these / mountains and deserts" plays on "ill" and "settled," placing the family's troubles in a landscape shaped by settlement and belief. The speaker's tone toward that backdrop seems wary.
The closing movement widens from one family to everyone: "we bug our neighbors and harm those we love." The "ship of decadence," stocked "with provisions / for the journey to where," recalls the old image of a ship of fools, sailing without a destination. Its question has no answer.
The poem's significance lies in its refusal to tidy any of this. It mourns without sentimentality, admits fear and cowardice, and treats mental illness as something inherited and unspoken, a hazard of the family rather than a story with a lesson. Ironically, it also does what the officials never did. By setting down the kneeling man, the broken glasses and the stolen paintings, it keeps a record, and a more honest one than a punched card.