This is so awesome and realistic concerning our ways of being in character for whatever reasons we do so. My heart nearly stopped when he said his daughter's dead. I love this!

The whole thing leaves me with tears pooling in the corners my own eyes...
This reminds me of all of those times when I don't know what to say to comfort others. How does one really comfort someone who has lost someone dear to them, a part of them? Even having gone through it myself I still can't form an answer that is adequate.

This also makes me think of some of the jaw-dropping comments people made to us when our son passed away... my all time favorite being, "Well, at least it wasn't one of your other kids because you love them more." And... we did give a laugh, a non-laugh, of incredulity... 22 years later we still laugh that someone could make such a comment...
I guess they weren't salesmen either, because we weren't buying what they said. And maybe that is the whole point of this poem... are we buying what others and we ourselves tell ourselves when someone dies? Does time really heal the wound? And maybe the real question is... Are we selling ourselves short by forgetting that our children live on?
Crys...

That last line blares after the somber silence of spacing. On the whole, the poem is haunting—each succeeding line like a self-conscious afterthought. First, a “salesman” takes 15 minutes to knock on a door. The reader knows what a salesman is, so there are certain expectations. Out of place at a funeral. And so it goes. All the phrasing turns from polite collisions into invasion of space—laughter, clouds, tears, and that word “repeated”, then even the salesman takes on a different meaning— but it’s somehow loud and jarring, like the line doesn’t belong there in all the sad, softened silence, and so you realize that that’s the whole point. The salesman doesn’t belong there. He doesn’t fit. He is an invasion of space. So he can’t be a salesman. He’s just a person. And from awkward and horrible experience, I’d say he wished he were anyone—any place other than himself. There. Mourning.

Charlie