Rappahannock

Mary Branch Spalding 

Sometimes the river’s a waiter with a silver tray,
sometimes a thief
 
stealing a swath of bank and trees
when rough brooms sweep Orchard Point.
 
Here we built our summer house,
walls the color of bleached shells.
 
Father, always first to rise,
Made a fire on cold mornings.
 
The weather stripping sang to us
on windy nights,
 
and months ricocheted off the screen door
under the porch light.
 
The family have all gone down to the river,
that thief, but I’ve kept the house.
 
 
 
----
 

A Virginia native, Mary Branch Spalding has a doctorate in counseling and practices psychotherapy in Rockland County, NY. Poetry has always been her soul food, fed by many workshops at 92Y and elsewhere. Some of her poems have been published in journals such as Potomac Review, New Orleans Review and Cumberland Review.

In awarding her the 2015 Rachel Wetzsteon Poetry Prize, Betsy Bonner writes: “the key to this highly controlled and elegant sonnet is revealed in smart tense shifts, with the volte, or ‘turn,’ in the final couplet. With echoes of Robert Hayden’s ‘austere and lonely offices,’ and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, “Rappahannock” recreates a sense of lost time made dearer by the natural world.”