River House. Sally Keith

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, sugar, and ice.

      For siesta we drive down to the beach,

      Swim, then talk, before returning to work in our studios.

      I can’t stop asking obvious questions.

      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

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