Anamnesis is a Greek word for "recollection," and it has a few lives. In Plato's thought, learning is a kind of remembering. In medicine, it is the history a patient gives a doctor. Both meanings sit well under this poem, which begins by looking back through "so many rooms in so many houses" and ends with a speaker unable to say what the looking-back has taught. Memory here gives no revelation, only a clearer sense of how much was left unfinished.
The opening sets up the poem's central tension between the permanent and the passing. The walls "have waited, / unseeing, / uncaring," while the speaker plays "various roles / in minor dramas." The theatre metaphor is quietly deflating. A life becomes a series of small productions, "some of my own devising, / some not," and "most / being incomplete." The line break before "being incomplete" makes the admission land like a small drop. Notice too the word "waited," because it returns. By the end, "something waits / to be / misunderstood," and the verb has moved from the walls to the hidden meaning of everything. The poem is full of things in suspension, and the speaker is one of them.
The second stanza widens the frame from rooms to the solar system. "The daydream / of purposeful action" is abandoning "us with / every movement / around the Sun." The phrasing is odd and effective. We expect motion to bring purpose, but here motion is what drains it away. Each orbit is another year of the ordinary, and the "mess" and "reluctance" feel less like a private mood than a condition of being alive. The pronoun shifts from "I" to "us" to "we," as if the speaker is checking whether anyone else shares this.
The third stanza is the most ambitious. Its phrase "the animals / that will not be themselves" can be read more than one way. Perhaps we are the only creatures who resist our own nature, or perhaps the line is a diagnosis of self-deception. The poem does not settle it. It then gives a bleak but precise picture of the human predicament: we know about "fragility" and "inevitable entropy," yet we "wait / while words emerge." That lone "wait" at the end of its line hangs in the air, and the poem's own sentence waits with it. Writing becomes something that happens to the speaker rather than something done, as words "seek / a story worthy of acknowledging" what lies beneath surfaces. The poem also hints that the story may never be fully understood, since what lies beneath is "to be / misunderstood."
Formally, this is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. The work is done by white space. Lines step rightward across the page, and the indentation acts like a rest in music, forcing pauses where "unseeing" and "uncaring" descend one under the other. The ampersands ("& we," "& I") give a casual, handwritten, almost notebook-like tone. That informality prepares for the sharpest turn in the poem, when a long, reflective, slightly formal sentence collapses into "Either serendipitous or fucked up." The swear word punctures the cosmic vocabulary of entropy and orbits. It sounds like the way a real person would actually summarize the whole question.
The ending then does something clever with grammar. "The choice is yours" addresses the reader, and "The choice is mine," follows with a comma where a full stop might be expected, so the thought leans forward into the final admission, "& I / can't decide…" The ellipsis refuses to close the poem. Having claimed that most of life's dramas are incomplete, the poem ends by being incomplete itself.
That is what makes it worth reading. It resists the usual consolation, in which looking back produces meaning. It offers an honest, wry, unresolved position instead, and it turns the reader's own choice between "serendipitous" and "fucked up" into part of the experience. The username under which it appears, wordsforghosts, may hint at the same preoccupation with absent presences, though that is only an inference. Within the poem itself, the rooms, the walls, and the unresolved dramas leave us with an uncomfortable question about whether a life is a pattern or an accident.