Lines For An Album Poem by Weldon Kees

Over the river and through the woods
To grandmother’s house we go ...


She waits behind the bolted door,
Her withered face in thirty pieces,
While blood runs thin, and memory,
An idiot without a name,
Recalls the snows of eighty years,
The daughter whose death was unexplained,
Darkness, blue veins, and broken leases.
Grandmother waits behind the door
(Sight dims beyond the curtain folds)
With her toothless smile and enuresis.


Over the river and through the woods
To grandmother’s house we go ...