River House: Poems

By Sally Keith

“This heartbreaking and robust poetry collection . . . explores the complexity of the mind in the midst of grief” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

These are poems of absence. Written in the wake of the loss of her mother, River House follows Sally Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly transfigured.

Incorporating her travels abroad, her experience studying the neutral mask technique developed by Jacques Lecoq, and her return to the river house she and her mother often visited, the poet assembles a guide to survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable pain. Even in the dark, Keith finds the ways we can be “filled with this unexpected feeling of living.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781571319111

Book preview

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