The poem describes a memory from the speaker's childhood of going to fetch water from the neighbor's well. As a kid, the speaker would go down the path past the cow and ruins of where a fine house once stood until it was burned down. The buckets of water were too heavy on the way back, pulling the speaker's mouth out of shape. Though the speaker can see themselves in the memory, they cannot feel who they were as a child. The speaker hears the sound of the bucket hitting the well walls but never hears the sound of themselves.

1. Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
By Jack Gilbert
1 April 09 http://www.hillsidebelize.net/discover/i/bluecreek.jpg
http://www.poets.org/poemADay.php

2. Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
There was no water at my grandfather's
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people's house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor's cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.
Source:http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20582

3. Jack Gilbert
Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, in 1925. He was educated in
Pittsburgh and San Francisco, where he later
participated in Jack Spicer's famous quot;Poetry as
Magicquot; Workshop at San Francisco State College
in 1957.
Gilbert is also the author of Transgressions:
Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2006),
Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the National
Book Critics Circle Award, and The Great Fires:
Poems 1982-1992 (1996). His poetry has been
featured in The American Poetry Review, The
Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon
Review, The New Yorker, and other journals. He
has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for
Poetry and a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts. Monolithos won the
Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry
Review Prize, and Views of Jeopardy won the
Yale Younger Poets Series. Both books were
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Source http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1275

4. National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month is a month-long, national
celebration of poetry established by the Academy of
American Poets. The concept is to widen the
attention of individuals and the media— to the art of
poetry, to living poets, to our complex poetic heritage,
and to poetry books and journals of wide aesthetic
range and concern.
Source:http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20582

5. http://www.slideshare.net/Neelima.A