‘The Poorly Built House’ by Max Ritvo

‘The Poorly Built House’ by the late Max Ritvo was and is a hard poem to get through. In fact, I don’t think I’ve read it from start to finish without stopping and looking away from my screen at least once. Ritvo’s story is well known and deeply affecting. It’s impossible to read this poem without thinking of death and inevitability. It took a few attempts to get past this stanza, about midway through:

I think my dying has been about my belonging.
My body parts seeking where they belong.
I imagine somewhere, my soul is doing the same.

There’s not a lot I can give you here, reader, as my heart is low in the horizon after reading and living with this poem. But I hope you live with it, too. I’ve lost loved ones to cancer—just recently, a relative who I saw last summer at a family reunion, smiling and affable and tall; from childhood, a dear friend, the smartest person I knew—and the poetry (so much poetry) that springs from terminal illness is a blessing and curse. That we can experience senseless death in such heightened ways through our art is senseless, and it is salvation.

Parnassus