River House. Sally Keith

60

      61  Chapter 61

      62  Chapter 62

      63  Chapter 63

        About the Author

      RIVER HOUSE

1.

      How do you picture the shape of a year in your head

      Is a question my grandmother often asked.

      The jog ends at the point where we watch the sun disappear.

      We drag sticks in the sand to spell out our names.

      To myself I write: Happy Birthday.

      The few trees before the beach in silhouette.

      The sky is red, the boats in the small harbor, docked.

      On the Rappahannock my grandparents moved to retire.

      As they aged, my mother rented herself this house.

      Because the land is the same level as the water

      The house sits high up on stilts. At night, from bed,

      The stars through the windows burn a circuit of lights.

      It all depends on where you start. A year is a circle,

      If not a point around which experience spirals.

      Because our mother is gone, we do not need the house.

      We tell ourselves this. Soon we will clean out inside.

2.

      Circular the table for eating, around which we talked.

      Golden branches vaulted the roads.

      The trip to Colorado had already been planned.

      Otherwise, I would never have left.

      Maybe you know my friend.

      Spectra inside spectra make cataclysm of day.

      Something like that. Disorder in all things.

      Mother, I won’t call to complain anymore.

      The geraniums are enormous. Bougainvilleas crowd the walls.

      Given a box, some people imagine a hammer and nails.

      In some kinds of poems, the arms are love.

      The day I ran with Dan at the reservoir,

      I hated how slow I was, but loved that my lungs could burn.

      Many years ago in school a visiting poet read my poem.

      I said I didn’t know what the poem was.

      Of course you do, she said.

3.

      When my mother could again recognize herself as living, she gestured

      For a paper to write her request: I want Sally to wash my face.

      When she knew she would die, she asked for colored pencils and pens.

      With cousins visiting, my father came from her room to us, at supper,

      To try to say in a normal voice: she doesn’t want to eat again.

      She was dying and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

      She was dying and before she was dead she had already left.

      There was traffic and my sisters were trying to get back to the house.

      The nurses said a bright colored shirt would be better. The priest sat with us.

      We even ate supper. We sat at the counter endlessly on laptops.

      We waited for men to come and take the body out of the house.

      That’s normal. That’s what happens when a mother dies in her house.

      One day I watched football non-stop. I talked about quarterbacks.

      In the morning you go downstairs to find someone crying or you do not.

      We got filled with this unexpected feeling of living

      Ten days before Thanksgiving, the day my birthday was.

4.

      To know yourself better practice forgetting.

      Infinite circles fit in a line.

      When I see the phone I want to call my mother.

      I take a class to learn about an actor’s tool, the neutral mask.

      My favorite mirror though is Ahab

      Caught on the deck in the eyes of Starbuck,

      The moment that leads to forgetting the track,

      Seeing his wife, considering turning, but then not.

      I love the luscious mowing later on, but no more than

      The moment between

      The two men, fact on the verge of doubling back.

      We practice moving in cataclysmic response.

      Earthquake, tidal wave, volcano, tsunami.

      In the dance studio, sheets drape over the mirror.

      We will learn, this way, to see ourselves better.

5.

      The three-tiered bridge, Pont du Gard, I read about incessantly.

      At the end where the water finally empties out

      After thirty one point six nine miles and ushered only by gravity,

      The castellum, walls adorned with silver dolphin swimming.

      That spring I was in France my mother spent alone

      At the house on the river caring for her father who was dying.

      At high tide the road in is swallowed, making the house an island.

      Hard to describe, but the walls are thin, it isn’t easy getting through storms.

      The day my grandfather died, I biked to town for our favorite cheese.

      I felt this as a celebration. Now, I want to know where my mother is.

      What kind of metamorphosis is death: beautiful or utilitarian?

      Sobin, writing on the aqueduct, ultimately surmises ostentation

      As the motivation for the unusually difficult architectural feat.

      I have thought about this for too long not just to write it.

      There isn’t really an order that would be correct. An aqueduct

      By definition is an artificial channel. It gets one thing to the next.

6.

      “You are sleeping on the earth and wake up for the very first time”

      Is the prompt for this exercise. All of us watch the masked actor.

      The moment she leans in on herself, the plane of attention is broken.

      “I now believe that this world is nothing more than a means

      Of being in another,” writes Kristin Prevallet.

      Swallows tuck in underneath the awning.

      We drink espresso with lemon,