River House. Sally Keith

      What place is this?

      Spain. We spoke together in Spanish.

      When Inma grows tired of my questions, we stare off into the sea.

      She tells me she lost her young daughter, no explanation.

      “But, Sally, life is not sad,” and I can feel the effort in her turning.

7.

      My grandmother once convinced us of a donkey

      Who lived in a shack. If we looked closely enough

      We would see him inside, stretched out on the couch.

      Whenever my grandmother saw a white horse

      She licked her hand and stamped it twice for luck;

      Whenever we crossed the Piankatank, she sang a song

      Beginning with a bullfrog, jumping from bank to bank.

      I got the sense my mother found these rituals silly.

      Or maybe it was just the repetition she resisted?

      It’s hard to know for sure and I wish I could ask.

      In Adam Phillips’ essay “On Excess” the argument builds

      From a single presumption: there is no overreaction,

      Neither in grief, nor love.

      Funny, I forget that.

      Funny, I go on reading, digging and digging for advice

      Wanting to believe and believe in nothing at once.

8.

      At a certain point, I recognize the sound I hear.

      The nieces of my neighbor, recently dead at ninety-four,

      Are cleaning the room he had lived in since before the war.

      Softened only by trash bags, old stuff hits the floor.

      “There is a lesson in all this,” one of them says

      As I leave my apartment to run an errand.

      Happenstance the conversations we hear out of sequence.

      In Wyoming on a car trip, for example,

      Two friends going on about losing their mothers.

      But my own mother was fine then.

      The roads were empty. I thought about strip mines.

      According to Lucretius, voices impact the ears

      From places through which the eye can never see.

      From prairie land, Devils Tower rises up into the sky.

      An igneous intrusion, the guidebook calls it.

      Rocks from fragments of rock carried by water and wind.

9.

      At Lecoq’s school of movement in Paris, the punter is one

      Of twenty essential actions. To practice, plant the long pole

      Beside your right knee. Ride the flat of your hand backward

      To indicate to the audience where the water should be.

      Punt: a long, flat-bottomed boat, square at both ends,

      Propelled by a pole, used chiefly in inland water for recreation.

      Punt: to ferry oneself along.

      Adding speech comes later, after physical mastery.