Answer: sorting through a father's shed after his death or departure, deciding what to keep

'I am meant to be deciding what to keep' and 'standing where he stood' indicate the father is absent and the speaker is clearing his space.

Answer: The father had his own private system, and the speaker was never taught it or never understood it. It suggests distance and a sense of being outside the father's world, as well as regret that the chance to learn has now passed.

Answer: Metaphor: the marks on the bench are a 'map'. It presents the damage as a record of the father's working life that can be read like a landscape, each mark a place and a time ('each one a Saturday I can almost name'). The bench becomes a document of shared history, and 'almost' admits the speaker's memory is imperfect.

Model answer: The radio 'only takes the one station', which suggests a narrow, fixed life devoted to 'the markets and the rain', the two forces that decided the family's fortunes. When the speaker switches it on, the report is bleak: 'The wheat is down' and the rain is 'somewhere south of here, which it always was'. The flat statements and the resigned 'always' characterise the father's world as one of waiting for relief that never arrives, and they hint at the financial strain made explicit in the next stanza.

Answer: The family's farm was in financial trouble and the bank inspected it, perhaps considering foreclosure. The father's response, straightening used nails 'one by one', implies thrift, pride and a stubborn refusal to waste anything during hard times.

Model answer: The repeated 'Here is' turns the stanza into a presentation, as if the speaker is showing the objects to someone, perhaps to the reader or to the absent father. The anaphora slows the poem and gives each item ceremonial weight, like exhibits in a museum or evidence. Both objects, the straightened nails and 'the chair he would not let us fix', reveal the father's stubbornness, so the repetition also builds a portrait of character through things rather than statements.

Answer: The speaker has a practical task (sorting the shed) but cannot carry it out. 'Instead' marks the poem's turn from inventory to reflection: rather than deciding, the speaker is re-enacting the father, 'standing where he stood'. It signals that the real subject is not the objects but the speaker's attempt to inhabit the father's way of seeing.

Model answer: The bent nail is the least valuable object in the shed, one of 'the bent ones kept, for what?', so holding it 'up to the light' reverses the opening question: the speaker now imitates the father's refusal to discard. The simile 'as if there were a wall somewhere / that only this nail would go into' imagines a purpose for the nail that may not exist, and the final line, 'and I was the one who knew where', is conditional ('as if'), so the knowledge is wished for rather than possessed. The ending therefore resolves the poem emotionally, since the speaker has adopted the father's posture and values, but it refuses to resolve it practically: nothing has been decided, and the 'logic' of the first stanza is still unlearned. What is inherited is the gesture, not the understanding.

Answer: the halting, sorting movement of memory, which lengthens as the speaker stops listing and begins to reflect

The short, list-like stanzas mirror the act of sorting; the final six-line stanza slows and expands as the speaker moves from objects to meaning.

Model answer: The poem builds the relationship entirely through objects, so that the father is present only in what he left behind and the speaker's feelings are expressed through handling rather than statement. The opening 'jars of screws, sorted by a logic I never learned' establishes both intimacy and distance: the speaker knows the father's habits closely but was never admitted to their reasoning. Objects then become a record of time shared, as in the bench's 'map of burns and spills', where the metaphor turns damage into memory and the qualifier 'almost' admits how much is already fading. The poem's anaphora, 'Here is the tin of nails ... Here is the chair', displays objects as evidence of the father's stubborn thrift, linked to the hardship of 'the winter after the bank came out to look', so that his character emerges from what he mended and what he 'would not let us fix'. The turn at 'Instead' shifts the speaker from cataloguing to imitation, 'standing where he stood', and the final image of the bent nail held 'up to the light' shows the speaker adopting the father's refusal to discard. The conditional 'as if ... I was the one who knew where' leaves the inheritance incomplete: the speaker has the gesture but not the knowledge. Through its objects, the poem suggests that love between a parent and child can survive as habit even when understanding was never fully passed on.