River House. Sally Keith

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СКАЧАТЬ Chapter 37

      38  Chapter 38

      39  Chapter 39

      40  Chapter 40

      41  Chapter 41

      42  Chapter 42

      43  Chapter 43

      44  Chapter 44

      45  Chapter 45

      46  Chapter 46

      47  Chapter 47

      48  Chapter 48

      49  Chapter 49

      50  Chapter 50

      51  Chapter 51

      52  Chapter 52

      53  Chapter 53

      54  Chapter 54

      55  Chapter 55

      56  Chapter 56

      57  Chapter 57

      58  Chapter 58

      59  Chapter 59

      60  Chapter 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 СКАЧАТЬ