Space, in Chains (3 page)
Authors: Laura Kasischke
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Poetry, #Regional & Cultural, #United States, #American
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, 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.
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.
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! 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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