Ellen bass love poem!
Summary
The speaker in "The Thing Is" addresses readers and instructs them to love life no matter what the circumstances are. Bass describes the type of challenging times that can stress a person to the point of nausea: when all the structure in a person's life falls apart, everything important crumbles like burnt paper.
The poet then uses natural phenomena as a metaphor for these challenging times that everyone faces in life.
The "silt" (fine sediment) of heavy emotions (particularly grief) fills the throat.
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Grief sits with a person like tropical heat that thickens the air. This feeling of grief is as heavy as water, making it more fit for creatures who breathe through gills rather than those who use lungs.
Grief is compared to the weight of one's own flesh, except that grief is like an extreme extra weight.
This extra weight is unhealthy; it is defined in the poem as "an obesity of grief" that causes a person to wonder how their body can withstand it.
Continuing on with the