Space, in Chains (3 page)

the glass door, the orchard. Beyond

the orchard, the garden bed, and

beyond the garden, all

the simple people I remember

simply standing in their lines.

Or sitting in their chairs

waiting for the film to start

or for the plane to land

or for the physician to call them in.

How easy it would have been instead

to stand up shouting

about cold, dumb death.

But there they waited

as if the credits

might begin to roll again.

As if the bandages, the bolts, the scrolls. The paper

towels, the toilet paper. And

as the family stood around

considering my hand, I could clearly hear

the great silenced choirs of them

singing soothing songs:

Who fended for

and fed me. Who

lay beside me in the dark and

stroked my head. Who

called me their sweetheart, their

miracle child. Who

taught me to love

by loving me. Who, by dying, taught

me to die.

Covered in earth.

Covered in earth.

On the other side

of this glass door.

Calm, memorized

faces to the sky.

July

July, that lovely hell, all

velvet dresses and drapes

stuffed into a hot little hole.

July trampled by the sweat and froth

of panicked circus animals.

You think,
Romantic

overload. She

exaggerates.
Melodrama, menopause, but no:

I was there, where the pale words, like light on a wave.

Where the forgotten ancient music was still played.

The lovers, gone. Their beds unmade. Their

pets in cages. Where the primal. Where the blur.

Where the tamed

bear, the injured bird of prey, maddened nocturnal animals

roaming the streets in the heat of the day.

And that girl there:

The chaplain’s little book of her, slammed

shut, as she

sits on the front stoop

painting her nails.

Sipping lemonade.

Just that age

when the cool, empty vestibules

are still behind you

in which one day

such desperate bargains

and trades will be made.

Wasps

I stumbled into this place with my suitcase packed full of prior obligations. The floor of the orchard littered with soft fruit, and the wasps hovering drunkenly over it all, and the last few pieces dangling from the branches—happiness, melancholy, sexual desire—poised in the vibrating air, ready to fall.

These systems already existed. So what did they want from me? The deep, deep cosmogony. The rigorous mimicry of genes. Algebra, democracy, infectious diseases. Farm implements, logic, religious convictions. A stick in the river. Music. Linguistics.
Sweetheart, it’s time to leave…

But, first:

A bus ride to the beach! My mother in a striped suit, with black hair. June. A pail full of sand and water. In the distance, someone on a boat, waving. The crippled girl floating on her back. The old man and the silvery blue consummation, laughing happily, up to his ankles, smiling at me. And my dead grandmother and her simple picnic. Some fruit. Cheese. Some cold fried chicken. The physical universe and its buzzing machinery, its fantastical scenery.

They were all around us that day. In the confusion of air. In our strange dreams. In the baggage we’d brought with us and would have to leave. In our fading animal memories:

The humming gold of being, and ceasing to be. The exposed motor of eternity.

Dawn

She was my friend who went crazy.

She was my crazy friend. Was

she crazy that day on the way to the lake, at

the mall, the luncheonette, my

bridal shower—was she crazy then?

Nights, the stolen babies sleep

so peacefully in the arms of their thieves.

Please, mothers, don’t scream when we take them.

Please, mothers, don’t scream you will wake them.

While, outside in the dark is the guest

whose invitation we forgot to send.

In the morning we’ll find him

asleep in our bed. Consequence

itself. Itself, and Regret.

Look

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it’s diamonds now. It’s pearls, public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every fucking magazine on this shelf for free. They tell us that most of the billions of worlds beyond ours are simply desolate oceanless forfeits in space. But logic tells us there
must
be operas, there
have
to be car accidents cloaked in that fog. Down here, God just spit on a rock, and it became a geologist. God punched a hole in the drywall on Earth and pulled out of that darkness another god. She—

just kept her thoughts to herself. She just—

followed him around the house, and every time he turned a light on, she turned it off.

Rain

The sun, made of water, like all

the secrets made of tongues—

it falls all night, and in the morning

the flames have been put out

and the stones, bewitched, can see:

The lost hours, and into the past.

The memories of infants, of cats, of

other stones—that they have souls.

That they
are
souls.

And the terror of foxes.

And the children’s hospital.

And the hangman’s alarm clock.

And the official on the doorstep.

And all the embezzled

cents and dollars

of the last time I saw you.

Peace

The boy climbs the tree that will be his ruin, and the ruin of his generation. The view from the top too dazzling to see. The air too bright to breathe. And the box inside him in which his mother resides is velvet and black and without size. And the nation waits in a shadow. And a baby about to be born is weighted down instead with a stone:

The tree, the boy, the celebrity divorce. The palace with all that blood spilled all over that marble floor: At the library again today, as at the car dealership and the grocery store, no one says a word about the war.

Pharmacy

A knife plunged into the center

of summer. Air

and terror, which become teeth together.

The pearl around which the sea

formed itself into softly undulating song—

This tender moment when my father

gives a package of cookies to my son.

They have been saved

from the lunch tray

for days.

Hook

in a sponge. The expressions on both of their faces. A memory I will carry with me always, and which will sustain me, despite all the years I will try to prescribe this memory away.

Medical dream

I open the door on a Sunday morning

to roses. The door

of my little cottage, my little door, choked

with roses. This

start of a tale about bewilderment, fatigue. The trees

in their temporary trances, and we in our animate brevity:

Health, there is no army for it. No

bus pass. No

factory.

It is the key

made of shadow

to the car that won’t start.

The slow rolling of the cement truck through town.

It is God

lasering His way across a landscape

littered with other gods. Their huge, lunatic dreams.

My clothes on a hook.

My body on a table. A knock

on my front door, and

Lazarus, the florist, delivering

roses

from relatives

from friends:

Lazarus, who surely never dared

to lay his head

on a pillow

and close his eyes again.

Near misses

The truck that swerved to miss the stroller in which I slept.

My mother turning from the laundry basket just in time to see me open the third-story window to call to the cat.

In the car, on ice, something spinning and made of history snatched me back from the guardrail and set me down between two gentle trees. And that time I thought to look both ways on the one-way street.

And when the doorbell rang, and I didn’t answer, and just before I slipped one night into a drunken dream, I remembered to blow out the candle burning on the table beside me.

It’s a miracle, I tell you, this middle-aged woman scanning the cans on the grocery store shelf. Hidden in the works of a mysterious clock are her many deaths, and yet the whole world is piled up before her on a banquet table again today. The timer, broken. The sunset smeared across the horizon in the girlish cursive of the ocean,
Forever, For You
.

And still she can offer only her body as proof:

The way it moves a little slower every day. And the cells, ticking away. A crow pecking at a sweater. The last hour waiting patiently on a tray for her somewhere in the future. The spoon slipping quietly into the beautiful soup.

The key to the tower

There was never

There was never

A key to the tower

There was never a key to the tower, you fool

It was a dream

It was a dream

A mosquito’s dream

A mosquito dreaming in a cage for a bird

It’s October

It’s October

The summer’s over

Your passionate candle in a pumpkin’s head

And the old woman’s hand in this photograph

Appears to be nailed to the old man’s hand

And the sky

And the sky

And the sky above you

Is a drunken loved one asleep in your bed

And the tower

And the tower

And the key to the tower

There was never a key to the tower I said

And this insistence

This insistence

It will only bring you sorrow

Your ridiculous key, your laughable tower

But there was

There was

A tower here

I swear

And the key

And the key

I still have it here somewhere

Space, in chains

Things that are beautiful, and die. Things that fall asleep in the afternoon, in sun. Things that laugh, then cover their mouths, ashamed of their teeth. A strong man pouring coffee into a cup. His hands shake, it spills. His wife falls to her knees when the telephone rings.
Hello? Goddammit, hello?

Where is their child?

Hamster, tulips, love, gigantic squid.
To live.
I’m not endorsing it.

Any single, transcriptional event. The chromosomes of the roses. Flagella, cilia, all the filaments of touching, of feeling, of running your little hand hopelessly along the bricks.

Sky, stamped into flesh, bending over the sink to drink the
tour de force
of water.

It’s all space, in chains—the chaos of birdsong after a rainstorm, the steam rising off the asphalt, a small boy in boots opening the back door, stepping out, and someone calling to him from the kitchen,

Sweetie, don’t be gone too long.

We watch my father try to put on his shirt

Somewhere, my dead mother kneels at a trunk, her head and her arms all the way up as she tosses things over her shoulders, and cries.

The letters, the fading. The labyrinth, the cake. The four hundred brackish lakes of the brain. She searches for the

music, but she can’t find it. Oh, God, it was here

only the other day.

He cannot do it. The shirt

slips to the floor. There is

dancing and laughter in hell, an angel weeping openly on a park bench in heaven. My mother, dead and frantic in an attic. A white shirt on a floor. An old man in a wheelchair, rubbing his eyes.
Here it is, here it is!
the occupational therapists sing as they rise to the surface of the earth, smiling, bearing their terrible surprise.

The call of the one duck flying south

so far behind the others

in their neat little
v,
in their

competence of plans and wings, if

you didn’t listen you would think

it was a cry for help

or sympathy—

friends! friends!—

but it isn’t.

Silence of the turtle on its back in the street.

Silence of the polar bear pulling its wounded weight onto the ice.

Silence of the antelope with a broken leg.

Silence of the old dog asking for no further explanation.

How

was it I believed I was

God’s favorite creature? I,

who carry my feathery skeleton across the sky now, calling

out for all of us. I, who am doubt now, with a song.

TWO

Your headache

I am trying to imagine it

Your head is in your hands

The nurse is pouring pills onto a plate

November again

Too late

Your headache

It is a bird

Wounded, in leaves

Its sweet bird’s nest is full of pain in a distant place

November

There are daisies

In the ruined garden, still blooming strangely

And in a manic yellow hat, the old lady

And the old man, dead in his bed

And their daughter, the saint:

Her dark, religious hair gets tangled in the branches

She is screaming, grabbing

While the nurses play Mozart in another room

While the bats fly over the roof