Nobody in "Cleaning the Attic" gives a speech about memory. Mary F. C. Pratt simply lets the junk pile up, and the poem works like an inventory taken by someone who keeps getting distracted by what she finds. Almost nothing happens. A woman sorts through boxes. Yet by the last line the reader has glimpsed several generations, a marriage, a career, a faith, and a long habit of putting things off.
That habit shows up early. The pillows "that don't match / anything but each other" are things "which someday I'll recover," and "someday" is the attic's motto. Objects go up there when they are too useful to throw away and too unwanted to use. The dishes "I saved / for the kids who bought better ones" are the sharpest case: the saving was an act of love, and it turned out to be unnecessary. The poem never complains about this. It only reports it, and the quiet is part of the effect.
The form suits that tone. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines follow the rhythm of someone talking while she works. The poem is built almost entirely from noun phrases and fragments ("Cowboy guns. / Campfire girl beads, / a wedding gown"), so it moves like a list, with a comma or a full stop for each object. The stanzas also thin out toward the end, and the last is the shortest, as if the sorter is tiring or the boxes running low. Within that casual surface, the sound is carefully tuned. "Wrapped in paper and piled in a pail" is a small run of p's, and "blue rubber gloves" and "a blue stuffed animal" echo each other across a stanza.
The list's order is its real craft. A comic item sits beside a heavy one and the two change each other. The sleeping bag "that he promised / would keep me warm" gets a line break right after "promised," which lets the word hang there. A reader may well hear a broken promise in it, though the poem never says what became of him. The scarecrow print is kept on the wall "till I couldn't stand it any more / even though my father made the frame," which is a whole family tension in one line: taste against loyalty. The costumes in the fourth stanza (wedding gown, opera costume, flight suit, green wig, paper skeleton) read like a list of roles played, some solemn, some silly, all folded away together. Then comes "my father-in-law's last bathrobe," and the joking stops.
The poem's boldest pairing is in the second stanza, where old textbooks sit "from before the Flood / arguing the case for Continental Drift, / books filled with proofs / for the goodness of God." "Before the Flood" is a joke, since the books are ancient, but it is also a biblical pun. Science and religion share one shelf, both confident and both now obsolete. Judging by the imagery, the speaker has outgrown neither the books nor the habit of keeping them. Later, Tante Lillian's missals and the Sacred Heart portrait appear with the confession that the speaker "forgot / to put" the portrait "into her coffin." The guilt is small and a little absurd, and that makes it feel true.
The poem ends on bathos. After a bathrobe, a coffin and a portrait of Jesus, the final object is "a broken lamp / given me as a parting gift / by a terrible boss." There is no moral and no tidy epiphany. Work and grudges are clutter too, and they get no more dignity than the Jerry Garcia clock before them. Hoth, the ice planet from *Star Wars*, appears in the poem's own spelling as "plant Hoth," a styrofoam-and-glove model that is funny and a bit touching. It sits in the same pile as everything else, and the poem treats all of it with the same level gaze.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it trusts objects to carry feeling. It refuses to rank memories, so a fireman's hat and a dead relative's bathrobe get equal space. Anyone who has helped clear a relative's house, or has been unable to throw out something they dislike, will recognize the mix of tenderness, guilt, humor and fatigue. The speaker keeps sorting, and the poem never tells us what she throws away.