Memory, in this poem, doesn't arrive in order of importance. A neglected baby, a spitting llama, a stolen set of arrowheads and a harp played by candlelight all turn up in the same breath. The speaker is sorting through a whole life and refusing to decide which parts count. The central idea emerges slowly: a life is made of everything at once, and its real substance is less the big events than the quality of attention, "being awake," as the last stanza puts it.
The first stanza sets this method up. "Sometimes the hungry baby was left to cry" is a painful opening, yet it is delivered flat, with no comment. The next lines slide into a zoo, a theft and a school play, as if the speaker were flipping through a box of snapshots. Then comes a line that stretches out, "Father pulled the sled through the lamplit park in the falling snow", and it is one of the warmest images in the poem. The very next sentence begins with "Later," and that single word turns the sled ride into something lost: "he started to drink and Mother wouldn't tell." Family secrecy is compressed into seven words. The stanza ends with comedy, "a Christmas when everyone had chicken pox", which suggests that the speaker has made peace with how ridiculous and painful a childhood can be at once.
The second stanza leans on repetition. "There was… There was…" gives it the feel of an inventory or a litany. The grammar treats every item alike, so a lover who "left without saying goodbye" sits beside "a lover who stayed," and "a sister who died" is followed by "a child who grew up and went away." Placed in parallel, death and growing up read as two kinds of departure. The dash in "illness that caused pain—yet always" is the poem's one real pivot, and what it turns toward is indifferent, lovely nature: autumn "creeping down the hills," coyotes singing "to the mice and the moon." Predator and prey share a single line, and the stanza has no closing punctuation, so it seems to drift open rather than finish.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The rhythm comes from syntax: blunt short lines ("a sister who died,") against long, unspooling ones. Frequency words organise the whole poem: "Sometimes," "Often," "Always." They turn it from a story into a pattern, a ledger of what tends to happen to a person over time. The past tense keeps everything at the distance of looking back, though the diction stays concrete, with crabapple bloom, daisy and vetch, and a sparrow falling.
In the third stanza the poem moves from scenes to abstraction. The speaker admits to years "without / noticeable weather, flavor or song," a frank acknowledgement that parts of a life go unlived or unnoticed. Against that stands "a moment large enough / to hold a city or a forest," where time swells into space. The speaker links such moments to wakefulness: "smelling every single thing, / noticing the way the light shifted, / the arm ached, the sparrow fell." The aching arm and the falling sparrow are given identical grammatical weight, so the body's small pain and the world's small tragedy are equally worth noticing. The sparrow may faintly recall older phrases about a sparrow's fall, though that is only an inference.
The ending turns to the body, called a "strange receptacle of lust and sleep." "Receptacle" sounds almost clinical, which makes the description funny and a little unsettling. Then the poem lets the cosmic and the ordinary collide: "where time and the highway intersected, / where infinity met friends for coffee." Infinity, usually a vast idea, is reduced to someone meeting friends for coffee, and the joke is also the argument. The final line, "every passage / was a kind of standing still", delivers the paradox. We feel ourselves moving through life, yet from inside the body each moment is simply here.
The title, "The Process," sounds mechanical, as if life were a procedure with steps. The poem undercuts that. Nothing improves, resolves or is explained. Hardships and delights simply accumulate, and the speaker finds a kind of grace in the accumulation. That is the poem's quiet achievement: it shows that a plain list, honestly kept, can carry grief, humour and wonder together, and it invites readers to start their own.