The difficulty I have here, and Zinya's post makes this point, is that the direction and variety of interpretation seems endless partly because this piece seems both ambivalent and judgmental.
….

This is an odd poem as it seems to ask for understanding, but its psychological drama seems poorly thought out.

I can understand OneArt’s confusion as articulated above, and I think the problem (or key) in understanding “Winter Accident” is Laura Polley’s repeated use of the word “must.”

“Must” can be interpreted a number of ways. It could mean “this is what you probably did” as in “you must have closed it too tightly, because now it’s impossible to open.” Or it could mean “what you have to do” as in “I must go to AA every week if I want to stay sober.”

Seventy-five percent of the poem is about the mother, who was “not part of this memory” of a dog being killed by a car, then brought to the garage of the narrator’s family. Some years later, the narrator seems to be trying to understand the mother’s actions – or rather inactions.

If we use the definition of “must” as “this is what you probably did,” the narrator does, indeed, judge her mother harshly for not comforting her ailing husband or distraught daughter, for “delegating comfort to the saints.”

However, if we use the definition of “must” as “this is what you had to do,” the narrator might, instead, be indicating that she now understands how her mother couldn’t handle the emotional stress and had to make a series of rationalizations to justify her inability to be up to the job of comfort-giver that she needed to perform.

I think the second interpretation is plausible because in describing her father’s collapse, the narrator says, “his soft / exterior caving in like cake.” Those last two words seem like a simile the mother might make. Perhaps it was really was the case that the mother couldn’t bear to think of her husband as soft as cake. Perhaps the husband couldn’t bear to have his wife see him that way. Perhaps the mother used that same mode of thinking (wrongly in this case) for her daughter.

In any case, I agree with OneArt that the narrator is ambivalent, as indicated by the author’s use of the word “must.” I think this ambivalence is deliberate, and I like it. (Or, at least, I don’t mind it.) To make a categorical judgment years after an emotional incident is fraught with possible misinterpretations. Better to be ambivalent and leave it at that.

MA, I considered your reading when I first read the poem, but concluded that reading required more generosity than the writer appeared prepare to give. It's the odd syntax of that last line that is troublesome: " You must be imagining we need you this way" either reading of "must" seems condeming, but I suppose there is some room here for a bit of charity in reading this as "you did what you needed to," but not sure the rest of the poem supports this idea. Although the grammatical subject of that line is "You," the emotional subject is "we need you this way" and that circles me back to thinking that although the writer may be acknowledging her inability to see beyond her own needs at the time, it still seems peculiar in it's ungenerosity. The advantage of time, and growing up and having your own kids is to suddenly see that your own parents did the as well as they could with the resources they had. I don't see that type of thinking here. I see someone stuck on something that they can't work around. Maybe in the end this is a matter of personal taste: I like poems that actively work towards something. I dont see that here. At best this seems like a begrudging acceptance. The tone of this piece makes me want to say: "have you talked to your shrink about this?"

The advantage of time, and growing up and having your own kids is to suddenly see that your own parents did as well as they could with the resources they had. I don't see that type of thinking here. I see someone stuck on something that they can't work around. Maybe in the end this is a matter of personal taste: I like poems that actively work towards something. I dont see that here. At best this seems like a begrudging acceptance.

OneArt, these dang post-modernist poets like to leave things hanging.

I considered your reading when I first read the poem, but concluded that reading required more generosity than the writer appeared prepare to give.

It is true that in my crits I tend to give poets and their poems the benefit of the doubt.

(It is also true that I don't care for the poem enough to spend much time on it.)

MA

(i've ditched my efforts to finish my critique. what was i thinking? to wit: )
You must be imagining we need you this way
it's the word imagining that lays blame on mother. it reads like, "are you smoking crack, woman?" or the ubiquitous, "what were you thinking?" none of which is a sensitive consideration of what might have been going on in the mind of another.

is there any good connection to be made between dad's exterior collapsing like cake and the memory positioned a week outside of mother's birthday?