Marie Howe's Poem 'What The Living Do'

In the poem “what the living do,” by Marie Howe explores the emotional impact of incest and death on a woman from childhood to adulthood. Marie Howe is saying that we spend so much of our lives obsessed with minutiae (trying to get the plumber to call, trying to fix the central heating, do the groceries) that we often forget how magical it is simply to be alive. Often, remembering someone we loved who has died (What you finally gave up) reminds us how precious life is.

It is a pretty cliché idea, and Howe has no original insight to add to it; but like most cliché ideas it is eternally popular with the slow-witted (this is also the life lesson that begins the universally approved book of modern philosophy Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder).

At the same time, Howe notes, guiltily, that she had already begun to imagine him dead and to plan what she would write about him. The poem ends with a reference to Jesus’ raising of the dead Lazarus. When Lazarus’s sister saw him alive, Howe says, she was “crushed . . . with gratitude and shame.” (Howe uses a similar biblical reference to Lazarus’s sisters Mary and Martha toward the end of this collection in “Memorial,” a poem about the death of a friend.)

Howe’s editing of In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1995, edited with Michael Klein) suggests that her brother John was dying of AIDS; the character Joe, who appears in this section, may have been John’s lover. The focus of this section, however, is on the slow-motion process of death rather than on its clinical details or the politics of its cause, and the details will seem familiar to anyone who has watched the gradual decline of a loved one. The process is painfully slow and painfully inevitable. Meanwhile, life goes on outside the sickroom in all its heedless