Space, in Chains (4 page)

Snatch the black notes from the blackness

Laughing

You cry

I am going to die

I can see them through this window

Their little black capes

The touching ugliness of their little faces

Space, between humans & gods

The day

en route to darkness. The guillotine

on the way to the neck. The train

to nudity. The bus

to being alone. The main-and-mast,

and the thousand oars, the

thousand hands.

And the ship sailing on

toward the glory and the gone.

And you, too, my beautiful one, having

outgrown another

pair of shoes,

tossing them into the box

we’ve named Goodwill.

And then the donkey ride to Bethlehem.

The long slow process of boarding the plane.

And my father

ringing the bell for the nurse

in the night, and then

not even the bell. Ringing

the quiet. Waiting

in the silence

as she travels toward him across it

wearing her white.

Swan logic

Swan terror and swan stigmata. Three of them slaughtered

at the edge of the pond

and one still

One still gliding in wounded circles on the black mirror of that, like

some music box tragedy inside some girl.

Or the swan inside the dying man pacing the hallways with a ball and chain.

Feathers in the road. One still

One still trying to drag itself back

to that black glass.

Incoming,
the nurse says

referring to the minivan.
We

must prepare the tables. We shall wear white.

The mother

The mother was drunk.

The children were killed.

Except for one

Except for one.

At the fair, the wild lights.

Lace your shoes up little darlings.

I’ll take you there tonight

There, tonight. The eternity of that. Swan logic. Swan history. The white

tents on fire. The air-raid sirens. The bloodied

brides. The grand hotels. The outgoing tides. The slow

progress of certain diseases. The urgent warnings

The urgent warnings:

The dreamy terror of certain summer mornings.

Swan God, who

God, who—

Who shot our swans. Who

was a decent man. Who

loved his family. Who

could not bear to watch them suffer. Who

killed them lovingly one by one.

Swan boats.

Swan souls. Swans

in cages, in trunks, in boxes, in plastic bags. Swans still dragging. Swans

still circling. Swan

still

Swan stillness and swan slaughter still circling the center of the swan.

Riddle

Mars, the moon, the man hammering on the roof all afternoon. The Greenwich clock, the worker bees, the agitated bubbles in a stream. They have a plan, these:

Theirs is the world of the railing nailed down around the canyon for the sightseeing blind.

A woman sprawls out on a beach with a book, ready to read, but, opening it, she sighs.
Oh my.
She has settled down on her towel with the life story of a fruit fly—

Believable, chronological, but so quickly erased that it only serves to prove that the universe is made of curving, warping space. That, if you think about order, it becomes disorder. That to want to succeed is to fail: The way those satellites pointed at the stars pick up no sound at all, except, every few decades, the discordant music of a few chickens in a cave.

Oh, yes, oh, yes, I see.

There is a bridge from here to there. But we all know it is the kind of bridge that blows away. The kind of bridge made mostly of magazines, cheap beer,
TV
.

Not built to weather much at all.

Not war, nor despair, nor disease.

Not even health. Not even peace.

There is a chasm beneath it, and on one side my father is in his hospital gown watching that bridge blow around in the breeze—and, on the other side, waiting, is the mysterious unknowable thing that might have made him happy in this life:

What if it was me?

The drinking couple, similes

Like the dead photographer’s final image

of shadow and gravel, and then

that first drink, and suddenly

we were relaxing

like anchors

eyeless in the silence

of something like a sea

while we

were also clattering

crazily

over cobblestones, like carts

tied to runaway horses

in a fiery scene

from some old movie, and we

were also the directors

burning down the set

and also the horses

and the scenery

until the next drink

like a princess waking up

beside a chimpanzee—

or that chimpanzee

in a tuxedo, strapped

to a rocket, launched

in a living room, like

not the strong man’s arm, just

the sleeve, as if

not only the birds but the cages

had been set free, the way we

were enjoying one another

enjoying one another’s

company

like a couple separated by mirrors

straight down the center of a beach
(if

you’re having another one honey will

you pour another one for me?)

like a crate of crutches

washed up on that beach

or a kite brushing

a satellite, a star, a whole

solar system, while also

snagged by its tail in a tree

still drinking

like a couple of cars without drivers

dodging each other in the street

or laughing, shouting automatons

or butterflies landing

in wet cement, thinking

now we’ll die

like party favors,
as if we

were actual human beings

or completely normal people

until the last drink

when we

had no more need of similes.

Your last day

So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the very

air around us bound by chains. There was

stagnant water in which lightning

was reflected, like desperation

in a dying eye. Like science. Like

a dull rock plummeting through space, tossing

off flowers and veils, like a bride. And

also the subway.

Speed under ground.

And the way each body in the room appeared to be

a jar of wasps and flies that day—but, enchanted,

like frightened children’s laughter.

O elegant giant

These difficult matters of grace and scale:

The way music, our savior, is the marriage of math and antisocial behavior.

Like this woman with a bucket in the morning gathering gorgeous oxymora on the shore…

And my wildly troubled love for you, which labored gently in the garden all through June, then tore the flowers up with its fists in July.

Which set a place for you next to mine—the fork beside the spoon beside the knife (the linen napkin, and the centerpiece: a blue beheaded blossom floating in a bowl)—and even the red weight of my best efforts poured into your glass as a dark wine before I tossed the table onto its side.

Just another perfect night. Beyond destruction, and utterly unlikely, how someone might have managed, blindly, to stumble on such a love in the middle of her life.

O elegant giant.

While, outside, the woods are silent.

And, overhead, not a single intelligent star in the sky.

At the public pool

I could carry my father in my arms.

I was a small child.

He was a large, strong man.

Muscled, tan.

But he felt like a bearable memory in my arms.

The lion covers his tracks with his tail.

He goes to the terrible Euphrates and drinks.

He is snared there by a little shrub.

The hunter hears his cries, and hurries for his gun.

What of these public waters?

Come in,
I said to my little son.

He stood at the edge, looking down.

It was a slowly rolling mirror.

A strange blue porcelain sheet.

A naked lake, transparent as a need.

The public life.

The Radio Songs.

Political Art.

The Hall of Stuff We Bought at the Mall. The plugged-up fountain at the center

of the Museum of Crap That Couldn’t Last

has flooded it all.

Come in,
I said again.
In here you can carry your mother in your arms.

I still see his beautiful belly forever.

The blond curls on his perfect head.

The whole Botticelli of it crawling on the surface

of the water. And

his sad, considerate expression.

No,
he said.

My son makes a gesture my mother used to make

My son makes a gesture my mother used to make. The sun in their eyes. Fluttering their fingers. As if to disperse it. The sun, like so many feverish bees.

I keep driving. One eye on the road, and one on the child in the rearview mirror. A man on the radio praying. The awful kid down the block where I was a child who buried a toad in a jar in the sandbox, dug it up a month later, and it was still alive.

He does it again. The sun, like the drifting ashes of a distant past. The petals of some exploded yellow roses.

The miracle of it.

The double helix of it.

The water running uphill of it.

Such pharmacy, in a world which failed her! She died before he was even

alive, and here she is again, shining in his eyes.

Light nodding to light.

Time waving hello to time.

The ninety-nine names of Allah.

The sun extravagantly bright and full of radiant, preposterous spiritual

advice—like a Bible rescued from a fire that killed a family of five:

I squint into it and see both a glorious parade of extinct and mythological beasts, and an illustration in a textbook of a protective sheath of protein wrapped around a strand of
DNA
—all cartoon spirals and billiard balls, and the sole hope of our biology teacher, Mr. Barcheski, who, finally enraged by the blank expressions on our faces, slammed it shut and walked away.

Recipe for disaster

Too sweet, the ingredients. Too high the heat. From this ladder leaning against a cloud, I see the future—that luminous egg of the mouse and her lover the Wild White Bird.

Look what has hatched between them!

Deep time passes. Affection. Family. Herd animals and garden plants. And that woman balancing an exaggeration made of glass on her head. She’s muttering something she overheard a girl once say to a steering wheel:

If you were so in love, why did you leave?

But she doesn’t want to hear the answer to that question when the guy beside her opens his mouth to speak. Trust me.

Still, she grows older, and continues to believe. The gentle runners disappear behind the sun. War rolls down the side of the Mountain of Grief so peacefully.

And, swarming north today in the soft green of spring, those glittering killer bees. A mother now, she opens the door and sends her son scampering into the lovely hum with an empty jar and a kiss on the cheek.

Atoms on loan

for Bill

The eyelid of a stone in my hand

flutters, and then it opens. I say,
Hello
?

For a moment, I was a woman with her son standing under an arch made of ancient rocks in Scotland. (You took the photo.)

For an hour in 1981 I was a girl with drunken hair in a swaying tower.

For a month or two in my twenties I paddled a boat made of lead down a river of blood with my hands.

Once, I stood on a mountaintop gulping air from a cup
made
of that thin stuff. I drank so much I even drank the cup.

And, all that time, my bare feet in love with the ground. My green grapes scaling my green wall. My kite tangled in the highest wires, and something electrified into fire inside me.

And you, my shining Viking. You, my Viking’s shining shield. You arguing with some other wife in some previous existence. The ivy splitting straight through the bricks. The children screaming obscenities on the beach. My father dragging on this lit cigarette for a century. Our son when he slips into the shadows of his classroom:

Maybe we can still hear his laughter, but we can’t see him.

Who
are
we? Without one another,

who
were
we? Without one another,

who
will we be?

Water washing away the flowers.

Flowers being taught how to speak.

You’ll always remember me,
my mother said,
but someday you’ll no longer be sad about me.

How could she have been so wrong?

How did she know?

Dread

How simple, the beheading. Dread

It is also an illusion—diseased internal organ

floating in internal fog—You

could stuff it back in after pulling it out

or you could look at it carefully in the sun

It is also a projection—

awful shadow puppet on an awful wall

Also, a god, all-powerful, with a voice, without a tongue

It is a season, too

The season in which you carry the dead thing

up the mountain in your arms

only to be given something squirming in a sack

to carry back

Or the season in which you are given