Six decades pass in a handful of lines, and what survives of them is not milestones. There are no weddings or births announced, only a smell, a tired body, a car pool, a dark window. Barbara Newman's speaker goes through her life like someone flipping through a shoebox of photographs, and the surprise comes at the end, when she wishes the box would simply disappear.
The poem is built as a countdown by tens: "at 20," "at 30," "at 40." The numerals give it the brisk look of a ledger, and each entry gets one scene, as if memory had room for only a single snapshot per decade. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The free verse sounds like someone talking, and without rhyme nothing cushions the entries. The lines swell in the middle, where the 50 and 60 entries each need two lines to hold their anxiety, and then collapse into the short, flat "at 70. I sit alone." Even the form seems to lose energy as the speaker does.
The first scene is the only one with any pleasure in it. "Men who smelled of Polo cologne" is a sharp, specific detail, a brand name and a scent rather than a face. Smell is the sense most tied to recollection, so it is fitting that the earliest memory is the one the body keeps. The next phrase, "thinking only of me," is ambiguous. It could describe the men, or the young woman herself. Either way, the attention in this scene is aimed at her.
After that it drains away. At 30 the line break strands the pronoun: "when I nursed my baby, I / had no thought to ever wash my hair again." The "I" hangs at the end of the line, close to disappearing, and the self shrinks into the needs of someone else. At 40 she drives "all day / without complaining," a phrase that could be pride or a clenched jaw. The poem doesn't say.
The key word is "waiting," and its object keeps changing. At 50 she waits up for teenagers, "fearing the worst." At 60 she waits up for her husband, "thinking of divorce." The two lines are almost identical, which makes the change between them harder to miss. Fear for the children becomes something close to resentment of the husband. The word "thinking" also returns here, and the poem suggests that for the first time since twenty her thoughts are turning back toward her own life. Her marriage appears only as a person to be waited for, with no scene of the two of them together.
Then comes the pivot. The only full stop in the sequence lands after "70," and the verb shifts from the past tense of "danced," "nursed" and "sat" to the present: "I sit alone." The final line is cut off by white space and set in the same lowercase, unpunctuated voice: "waiting for these memories to die." The habit of waiting remains, but its direction has reversed. For decades she waited for people to arrive, and now she waits for something to leave.
The title and last line turn the usual elegy upside down. Poems about aging tend to fear forgetting, but this speaker longs for it. The poem never says why. The memories may hurt because the house is now empty, or because they are full of worry and unspoken bitterness. Memories also live only as long as the person who holds them, so the wish for them to die edges toward a wish for her own end. That is a reading rather than a statement, since the poem leaves it unsaid.
The poem matters because it gives dignity to a life made almost entirely of unglamorous service, and it does so without sentiment or a consoling ending. It doesn't tell us whether the memories fade, or whether she finds peace. It leaves her in the chair, at the hour she once spent listening for a car in the driveway, now listening for nothing.