Eight couplets, and in each one a piece of terrible news sits beside something trivial. A mother keeps falling; a flashlight goes missing. A mother fails to recognise her child; the child takes another photo of the sunset. The title, "Incongruous," names the method, but the poem's real argument is that these things are not incongruous at all. They are what a mind does when it is carrying something too heavy to look at directly.
The poem is about watching a parent decline. The mother's lines build in a quiet staircase: she falls, she loses track of where she is, she resists the doctor, and finally she does not know her own child. Nowhere does the speaker say "I am afraid" or "I am grieving." The feeling has to be inferred from what leaks out sideways, and the leaks are what make the poem so affecting. A person in this situation might well burn the rice, lose a flashlight, or stare at the sky for no clear reason.
The structure helps carry this. The mother appears only in the odd-numbered couplets, while the even ones turn to the dead cat, the garden, the equinox and the tomatoes. The effect is a rhythm of approach and retreat. The poem moves toward the painful subject, then steps back into the world outside the house. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are plain, flat statements, mostly joined by semicolons, which let two unrelated facts stand side by side with equal weight. That flatness is itself a kind of emotion. It sounds like someone reporting events in a steady voice because a shakier one would be unbearable.
The imagery repays a closer look. Fire runs through the poem: "poison parsnip burns," the burned rice, and Jupiter that "burns through the sky before dawn." The burning begins as an injury, becomes a small domestic failure, and ends as something almost grand, a planet blazing in the dark. Light is the other recurring concern, and it is mostly failing: the missing flashlight, the "low battery light" blinking red, the moon "tangled in the oak," the setting sun. The speaker keeps checking the sources of light, as if looking for one that will hold. The tangled moon is especially good, because the moon is usually a fixed point for orientation, and here it is caught and unable to move freely, just as the mother "doesn't always know where she is."
Smaller echoes tie the couplets together. The cat is "suddenly dead," a sharp contrast with the slow, uncertain loss of the mother, and the word "suddenly" suggests how much the speaker would prefer a clean ending to this open-ended one. The computer mouse in the fourth couplet returns as the real "mice" picking at the tomatoes in the last, so the machine and the animal become the same small, nagging presence. The weeds "have spread through the garden bed," and the word "spread" quietly suggests illness, though the poem never makes the link explicit. That reading is an inference, but the placement invites it.
The sixth couplet is the poem's hinge. It is the only one where the second line is a question, and the only one that moves from objects to belief: "do I still believe in god?" It arrives with no warning, directly after a sentence about weeds, and the poem gives no answer. Perhaps the question is left hanging because the speaker has no answer, or because the daily list of troubles leaves no room for one.
The most painful pairing comes next: "My mother didn't recognize me this morning; / I took another photo of the setting sun." The photograph is an attempt to keep something that is going, and the word "another" implies a habit of trying. A mother who no longer recognises her child is the thing that cannot be photographed. The poem ends not on her but on Jupiter, burning before dawn, which gives the final image a stubborn brightness while it is still dark.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty about how grief actually behaves. It does not tidy sorrow into a lesson. It lets attention scatter, lets the mind drift to rice and mice and planets, and trusts the reader to see the pattern underneath. The gaps between the lines say more than any direct statement could.