Selling Door to Door

Who bears the riddle of our lives,
I’d ask reluctant housewives;
why must we sing of ashes in the grate?
Their faces were like walls to climb,
their bodies tense as startled deer
and in a voice soaked through with fate
I’d gently push past fresh-cracked doors
To randomly invade a life
caught up in ordinary pain
and spread my samples on the floor
and make lame jokes about the rain
or how the local team had lost
or how the more things stay
the same the more they cost
while all the while considering
what ultimately must be done
to leave as smoothly as I’d come
and make her buy another one
of something neither she nor I
had ever dreamed she needed
till we met and I convinced us then
just walked out slowly backwards
so it seemed like I was walking in
again.