In Their Own Words
Laura Kolbe on “Keeping House”
Keeping House
Hard to square how much I wanted
with how much requested:
the ask and the take
like two inscribed columns against
a pink dawning margin, or the classic
rabbit-duck illusion hinging
on the aimless eye.
I was proper, merciful—
I wanted the warfarined mouse on the rug
to be sleeping only.
I watched the train flow by
and never once took it.
I was becoming a woman
like the dead:
fond of coins, dreams, cakes,
votives, hopeless
at adding to my deeds.
For a week I tried keeping
forks and spoons in separate
drawered slots. But everything
that aids you tends
toward a similar handle.
You accustom to a certain
blue enamel, to a few blue
inches between you
and the slop.
When I flushed away
my pills to make a baby
cross the red carpet
and tootle at the planetary flash
a recreant hunger rattled me.
I sat open-legged
at my husband’s feet
like a splayed magazine
and waited, paludal, for one
of the two ways of keeping book,
the rabbit, or the duck
– do you see
the long haul
as velveteen or bill?
Of “housekeeping” and “keeping house,”
which title tells you more
of how I did?
Any way
I looked, the neighbor’s dog downstairs
had a tumor behind
one eye standing
out poached and disabused.
The dryer in the basement
so stuffed along its hose with skin and thread
we wore our fellow tenants
like a beard.
The baby wore a trench and specs,
slipped back into the crowd.
As banister and vinyl
siding came undone, so too
my pretense to scholarship,
my hours at the institutes for tick and tock.
So-and-so’s drone, mike angled
like a rotting corsage,
it all seemed a tale absent
the frazzle of seduction,
Scheherazade at the fish counter
too behaved with the numbered
white tongue of her turn.
Waiting for the sign to match her slip.
One can wait to be swept up
for weeks and weeks.
Rattling in my carrel, how I wanted out
to my yellow-sided house,
my Decadent Movement.
Malady of dreaming!
The basement with its gallery of paint cans,
the washer-dryer leashed
to ghosts and fumes.
The “good eye” rufous, desperately twinkling,
its confrere blind and bulging
like a belly. Years after, dog and banister
put or taken down,
I still have my domestic arts.
I rent and rend and rut.
I think I think of certain animals
as the signs for certain years
because there is no actual heir to flesh.
Rabbit, duck, or dogfish,
any eye could be the volta.
Nights when the train veered by,
almost and never reaching us,
I licked my cornered parts
the way a dog would
or a duck parting its plumage to unearth
its secret fur-white coney pelt, having
always favored the open gloss
over being over it.
"Keeping House" from Decadent Movement by Laura Kolbe. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
On “Keeping House”
The poem “Keeping House” comes late in my collection The Decadent Movement, which traces in reverse chronological order “my” first year of being a parent and “my” experience of being pregnant, winding the clock back all the way to the moment (well, the millennia, really – truer still, the eternity) before this rather humble biological process was set in motion.
I put “my” in scare-quotes here because I’m prone, in my work, to wobbling between a calendrical, documentary, hand-on-the-Bible-before-the-judge sense of record-keeping and a looser, more playful way of collaging disparate moments of experience and fantasy to make new compositions that use the aesthetic of the diary or the confession-booth but don’t mind a bit of perjury. (As it happens, my own mother was a county court administrator before leaving the workforce to raise me, which I am just now recalling, and which may say something about my deepest preconscious beliefs about the relationship between juridical truth and parental or gravid truth – the latter perhaps coming about because the former can be given the slip.)
For example, “Keeping House” came about as I was searching for a way to write about the leap of faith it took for me to allow myself to get pregnant – to make myself vulnerable to pregnancy, I suppose (I realize this may strike some as a flowery euphemism for “unprotected sex,” but I do mean more than that!). In my floundering to write such a poem, I came across fragments of another poem I had abandoned, about a yellowy house I had inhabited in Boston a few years earlier, from 2016 to 2019.
Something about the rickety, faded elegance of that jaundiced rental, its presence at the very end of the T line (though I could see and hear the higher-speed trains whipping past us, forming a moat or a sort of Splash-Mountain-River-Styx), had given me a vertiginous sense of limbo. Whether or not to become a parent hade made, even then, for part of that purgatorial, antechamber feeling, though at that time the greater limbic blasts were coming from my own ambivalence about whether and how to become a good doctor, as I was training to be.
I realized I could use the yellow-house setting as the theater in which to stage the pre-pregnancy poem I wanted to write, about how life had felt in early 2022. (I have to believe this kind of demi-fictional anachronizing is fairly standard fare for lyrically-oriented poets, though usually we let the birds eat our breadcrumb trail rather than posting the route to Strava.) Suddenly the kind of Breton-esque automatic writing that I often resort to in order to start building up a poem was actually yielding connections that felt exciting, funny, bizarre, true. The seemingly arbitrary reversibility of certain compound words – housekeeping versus keeping house, bookkeeping versus keeping book – pointed me to a world of chance on a knife’s edge, where growth or collapse, lying-in or missing-out, felt equally likely, like the optical trick of the famous rabbit-duck picture.
In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode wrote that we all “agree” (at least in English) that a clock “says tick-tock,” but that this is a fiction, one of our earliest and simplest untrue stories. “It is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds: tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end.” Like every plot, the tick-tock is “an organization that humanizes time by giving it form.” It is soothing to think that the clock says this, then that – that there is change, progression, dialectic – and not simply THIS. THIS. THIS. Kermode was, of course, a partisan of the novel: to say that “plot” is fundamentally false was his way of paying a compliment to our ingenuity as endlessly lying, self-soothing animals. I think of Kermode’s remarks often, but remember doing so especially during this poem. The clock famously is best heard by those who are in some way stuck, even though the story it purports to tell is about propulsion through space-time. This poem’s speaker is unsure whether she’s holding still or barreling forwards, nor which option she hopes to be true.
