Space, In Chains

by Laura Kasischke

  So much screaming in a small place

  In a cage for a house cat, a cheetah

  There is too much room in the shoe

  The shoe’s too big for you

  The fish flopping in a bucket

  Waddling through the orange grove, a wounded duck

  So much screaming in that freedom

  Butterfly on a windshield, clinging to a breeze

  But, listen. I, too, stole something once only to stuff it in the trash

  Together, me and you, thieves in one another’s shoes at last

  Or, better yet—

  Have we become one another now, running barefoot in the grass

  The mystical, final physics of that

  Passion-in-July

  I am the flower called Passion-in-July. Thirstless, yellow, growing in profusion under the awning of the condemned bordello in the morning.

  No. No.

  I bloom in the garden of the aging phys ed teacher in the middle of the night. She dreams of herself in the humid gymnasium, the walls lined with fur, the children running around her in mad circles. She wakes up not perspiring, but burning, singing, Farewell, you cool violets in your shady hollows. You delicacies longing for water. I am the flower called Passion-in-July. Not sad. Not sky. If I could laugh, it would be

  in the face of the cemetery, virginity—those two mossy knolls.

  It would be at the expense of the canvas shoe and its white laces, rubber soles.

  Cigarettes

  Back then, we smoked them. In

  every family photo, someone’s smoking.

  Such ashes, such sarcasm, the jokes

  that once made loved ones

  who are dead now laugh and laugh.

  Cigarette in hand.

  Standing glamorously at the mantel.

  The fire glowing

  ahead and behind

  and all the little glasses

  and the snow outside

  filling up the birdbaths, the open graves, the eyes.

  And the orchestras in gymnasiums!

  That mismanagement

  of sound. The wonderful

  smoke afterward

  in parking lots, in lungs. How

  homeliness was always followed

  by extravagance back then.

  Like hearing lovemaking

  in another room

  or passing suffering

  on the side of the road

  without even slowing down:

  So it is to remember

  such times

  and to see them again

  so vividly in the mind.

  Like a mysterious child

  traveling toward us

  on a moonless night

  holding a jar

  containing a light.

  Cytoplasm, June

  The earth, spewing forth creatures.

  Creatures, running wildly down mountainsides, stampeding over prairies, streaming from their holes and homes, frothing through rivers into lakes—feathers, fur, skin, hair, hooves, scales, claws. And all the subtle, separate emotions endured by them—expressed by lovers, induced by drugs. Birth, pain, terror. Humiliation. The terrible dull despair of a long drive through a large state beside a spouse who has grown over the decades to hate you.

  Every morning we wake tethered to this planet by a rope around the ankle. Tied fast to a pole—but also loose, without rules, in an expanding universe. Always the dream of being a child afloat in the brilliant blue of the motel pool falling away, and an old man with cancer waking up on a bed of nails. Please, don’t remember me this way, the world would like to say. And yet…

  This is the entirety of the lesson. The lesson you learn from loving so greatly that which hath forsaken you:

  It is a very, very small lesson. But not as small as you—

  You, who are both a speck of dust drifting in silence out of the sky onto its brief gauzy wing, and the passing fancy of that passing damselfly.

  Riddle

  We are a little something, God’s riddle seems to suggest.

  Little memories.

  Little wisdoms.

  Little matches,

  bright or snuffed.

  Where did my grandmother go when she pulled her curtains closed?

  I watched her window fade

  from the backseat of my father’s car, thinking

  She is ancientness. She has lived forever. It has driven her insane.

  But the New Old.

  When did they grow

  So Old?

  Some of them are sleeping in the hallway.

  Some are in their rooms

  listening to rock ’n’ roll.

  This moment of wisdom, I cast you off.

  This grand foolishness, I embrace you.

  And my father—the kindest, cleanest

  man I’ll ever know—

  is spitting on the floor, demanding to know where I came from.

  THREE

  The knot

  The knot in the mind. That pounding thought. The cricket all night. That bright singing knot. That meditation on knots, which is a goat. The child who will be the knot of its love. This love like a knot concealed in a cloud. This death-obsessed knot with a backache, a knot-ache, holding its eye to a microscope. This loosening knot, and its greatest hope. This knot that is energy transferred into form. The knot of an eye. Not asleep. Not awake. But waiting, this knot. Like machinery parked beneath a tent made of gauze. This cramped signature on a piece of paper. A thickening knot. An egg like a knot. Not a fist in a lake, this knot of a stranger. Not the bureaucrat’s stamp on the folder of our fate. But a knot nonetheless, and not of our making.

  Animal, vegetable, mineral, mist

  It rose all day over the snow

  in the warm unseasonable so.

  Evocative of yes. Suggestive

  of no.

  While the ants underground continued

  their mindless knowing, and the children

  in the sweatshop

  went about their childish sewing.

  The optimistic mist insists There is a God.

  The pessimistic mist shrugs. Perhaps

  there is, but you’ll never know. And I

  am reminded of the beautiful housekeeper at the seaside

  resort so many years ago—

  how busy she was flushing stars and doves

  down the radiant toilet with her radiant wand

  in waves and roars

  in her gray clothes.

  Too, the bit of fluff I watched

  rise one Sunday morning from the hole

  in a teenage boy’s down coat, to float

  through the whole cathedral, until

  it reached the baptismal font

  where it hovered for a long time before it came to rest

  at the center of the sacred water, like a test.

  And then

  through my weird tears

  a clear vision

  at the center of the others:

  My father

  and the way for decades he drank his beer

  beneath one bare bulb in a basement, like

  a man desperately struggling to drown

  a pale deer slowly in a shallow pond.

  Riddle

  The bodies of the girls in their beds, on their bikes, riding their horses through the clover, watching Snow White, sprawled on the rug chewing gum, reading Laura Ingalls Wilder—and, all the time, the chemical messages, the disseminated enzymes, the man in a tuxedo holding the door open wide, making that sweeping gesture with his arm.

  Oh, biochemical seducers, hormonal wash, the external thyroid of a tadpole turning it irreversibly, involuntarily, into a frog.

  They told us it was a dance, a party, a pageant, so we ran laughing together straight into the disaster. A pack of hounds dozed in the grass. Down the stairs, we ran, still wearing those glittering tiaras in our hair. Scaled Hadrian’s Wall in our high heels. The hounds snapped their teeth in a dream. The gee
se overhead flew in formation, obeying the vague whisperings in their bird brains explaining to them the ridiculously complex rules of their own migrations.

  While our mothers stood helplessly by and screamed,

  and the farmers plowed their ancient fields,

  and our fathers watched us from the front

  porch

  tapping their chins and wondering—

  who were we?

  Confession

  Like an animal cut in half

  Like its stomach full of stones

  Like light pouring off of an accident—more light, and more

  Like a shadow in a threshold

  Like a document at the end of a corridor

  Like human beings in pastures grazing

  Like mourners, like horses

  Like official violence

  Torture

  Like the hospital room of the child after the parents have left

  Like facing your prom dress in your nakedness

  Like facing Oblivion in your prom dress

  Like black coffee spilled on the lilies

  Like milk splashed onto the ashes

  Here I come: The man dragging something

  The thing he drags: Here I am

  You

  If you kept walking you would, eventually, step out of this blizzard. You would walk to the place where even a blizzard reaches its limits. The ragged edge of its sum total. The place it stops and says, No more.

  And the sky, suddenly, would be, above you, unabashedly blue.

  But here, the flakes still fall in their slow motion, wearing their geometries like trances. Perhaps no two are exactly alike, but they are also too alike to be given names, too much the same to be granted lives. They fall in crowds in the world as well as in the mind.

  But you were beautiful, too, and free of illusions, so why—?

  Well, I keep forgetting. You never listened to my suggestions. Never asked for my advice. When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.

  Abigor

  He is the demon who knows all the secrets of war:

  How a leader wins

  the love of his soldiers.

  He is also the puppet discarded on the floor.

  And the dying dog

  panting with the sound

  of an empty basket

  in the back yard.

  He’s the veranda on which the champagne kept flowing.

  And the cool shade in which the witnesses

  were tortured

  until each one managed to tell a more

  fantastic tale than the one before.

  And the chiming of little birds

  in the grass

  just after—

  And the guests gathered around the—

  pretending to laugh.

  And also the desperate

  shrieks of the mink

  caught in a trap

  down by the creek

  still with the swan’s blood fresh on its teeth—

  that unbearable song about the memory of that pleasure.

  Forgiveness

  Mercy, like the carcasses of animals in a foyer, being burned.

  Fragrant, dreaming, unreal, and having to do, terribly, with love.

  The sun shining dumbly all over this world and its troubles. The self on tiptoes sneaking away from the self. In the passing lane today, a woman with her mouth open behind the wheel of her car. Singing, or swearing, wearing a coat, driving through her life, and mine.

  Hello, little lifeboat made of straw. Hello, floating multitude of my sins in a basket called Forgiveness on an ocean the name of which my son once mispronounced the Specific.

  Hello, ugly memory of myself crouched down with my fists on my thighs yelling at that child:

  Something about a stuffed animal and we’re already late, and the palsied trees of winter behind me reflected for thousands of miles in his eyes.

  Pain pill

  Today as the beauties slice across the frozen

  lake in their bright skates, all

  daggerish light in the distance, just

  between swallowing

  and sleeping, I’ll—

  One eye open in a grave.

  One star over Bethlehem howling

  over all the other stars.

  Or the gray

  spider sewing some old notion of herself between

  the shade and the pane. The way

  the memory of pain becomes

  just that pale foam

  left on the shore by the receding wave

  or any of the other leftovers

  of those Great Things

  that meant you were alive

  for a little while, and which

  to love

  would be too much, and to hate

  would never be enough.

  Now the skaters

  are falling into dusk

  one by one, as into wounds. Or

  they skate on, but I can’t see them. How, drunk, once

  I stood in front

  of my own door

  unable to open it, until

  finally I thought

  (such deep thoughts)

  Who’s to say whether or not

  I’m holding the wrong

  key, or jamming

  the right key

  into someone else’s lock?

  That water that swallows us:

  There is a heart

  pumping at the center of it. So much

  submerged thunder.

  Or a match burning

  between the pages of a book. Or a dove

  with a pellet in its side, still

  flying, still

  wearing

  its feathered self around it, but

  undoing all memory

  of flight

  as it flies.

  Almost there

  The snail crossing the freeway in a rainstorm. A map might have helped. A more beautiful face. More life experience. Expensive perfume. A horse.

  Given fewer options, and a grid. If not for uncertainty, the ancient Greeks, the ridiculous cheerfulness of sunflowers, the drifting immemorial ashes of the blueprints, the soup grown cold, the aunts gathered around the fiery cake, chanting, Make a wish! Make a wish!

  The statistical index. The genetic predisposition. If. If. If.

  Sing it all day long. Without it there is nothing but this code of lies, and the traffic of too much music in the mind. If is the diamond at the center of every life. The shining woman opening the window out of which her toddler will fall on a bright-white day in July:

  Dad on a ladder outside.

  Sister blabbing on the phone.

  Not a cloud in the sky.

  Not one thing wrong.

  Almost there.

  It is their song.

  The Pleasure Center

  It was tucked for us into the hypothalamus. Thank you, our lopped-off heads rolling all around the earth. Thank you, radio, movies, booze.

  And thank you, too, racquetball court, video game, throbbing bass in the car at the stoplight as it pulls up next to ours.

  Little fragment of a magnet.

  Shrapnel in the attic.

  Child on a bike.

  Old woman on her knees beneath a suffering Jesus.

  ADULT SUPERSTORE NEXT EXIT!

  All of it crammed into a thing the size of a tadpole’s eye.

  That terrifying tininess. Thrilling, flickering, wet. Space and Time writhing

  around in a bit of slippery shining. God decided to stick that in our minds.

  And even the miniature golf course on fire.

  The fatal dune buggy ride.

  The smell of some teenage girl’s menthol cigarette.

  The whole amusement park, and the cotton candy—that

  pink and painful sweetness beside you on the seat of some rollercoaster’s silhouette

  in the pinwheeling sun as it sets.

  We were perfect
test subjects for this.

  As God is my witness:

  I woke one morning when I was seven to find

  the most unhappy man I’ve ever known

  laughing in his pajamas. “What

  are you laughing about?” I asked him,

  and he said, “I don’t know.”

  Lunch

  has vanished. Just

  a few crumbs on a plate, and the subway rumbling under us. It was

  the Last Lunch. A bunch of us. We

  would never be together in this life again.

  A vein. A noose. A summer day. A rat crouching low

  on the clattering tracks.

  A storm. A scarf. A secret game. A man in the massive shadows

  of the columns

  of the Museum of Griefs-to-Come. A man

  who would forever remain

  our Observer, our Stranger

  smirking in the corner of the photo behind our smug, shining faces.

  Trees in fog

  These trees in fog, not stirring, not calling:

  How insistent they are

  that they’ve been here all along

  holding their tangible emptiness in their arms.

  I admit it, I was wrong.

  Here I stand, admitting it.

  Like the mistress of the rich man

  no longer in love

  swallowing the pearls he gave her

  one by one:

  I was wrong.

  But how I walked it—tenacity, my little dog—so

  far and for so long. Walked

  my wrongness all over the world.

  Dressed it up.

  Showed it off.

  But that’s all over now.

  Now, I am a woman who realizes she was wrong.

  And how wrong.

  Now, I am a woman who would—

  No.

  Just throw me a veil.

  Like them, I will bear it on the landscape.