Space, in Chains (5 page)

the incalculable sums

and a lined piece of paper

and nothing to write with.
Add it up

Animal shudder. Something’s coming

Wormwood

for C. Dale Young

That a star in heaven

might have poisonous feathers.

That an angel might cast it for

us into the sea.

So it is at the end of the oncology ward:

The little dish of complexion soap

beside the dying woman’s bowl.

So it is at Chernobyl:

The Ferris wheel rusting

for decades in a forest.

The tiny shoes, the ruined reactor, the broken toys, the gas

masks hanging

from hooks on the back of the classroom door.

And the strong husband, the virtuous wife, the obedient

son and daughter, the brilliant

physician, the shadow

on the mammogram, the vault

full of wristwatches, lost, with one

still keeping perfect time

then stopping

at the moment—.

Also, the termite

gnawing at the foundation.

And the silent herds of reindeer

moving as

catastrophe through

the cool spring grasses of Scandinavia.

That it might have been foolish to fall in love with this world.

That God sent Word.

That the radiant dust of that

catastrophe

traveled for thousands

of miles on their fur.

That if God

were a man

who might have taken a lover, the lover

might have been you, iris, you

with a bright black beetle this morning

chewing religiously away at your beauty.

The sweet by-and-by

There is a place at the center of the earth where the dim rooms of our ancestors flicker. Their birds are there, and their crickets. The warm sand beneath their feet. A picnic. A whale washed up on the beach breathing in all the air around it, becoming solidity and dreamless sleep.

But they had dumb jokes, and personal identity. Half-baked ideas. I’ve seen their magazines. They, too, sought pharmaceutical peace. Longed for sexual release. It was not black and white, that world, despite the photographs. The amputation saws. There were individual moments. A panoply! The discovery of good luck. The invention of anxiety.

But even I who bring you the news cannot begin to believe it. The lost details of their lives are also lost to me:

A white sack filled with black feathers.

A hole at the bottom of that sack.

Those black feathers drifting into an abyss of similar feathers.

Never, never to come back.

Thanksgiving

I want it back

Dying from the hunger of it

Stones in the Horn of Plenty

Cold in a gutter

But that’s all just a little taste of death

The cornucopia pouring tender memories all over the family table

My perfumed mother in a new dress

My father confused with an electric knife

The seasonal feast, tasting like Time

Oh, my lucky platter, full once of nothing

Oh, my future tears in a dry cup once

All the little sufferings still to come

And the Great Loves

And the Great Loves

And we folded our hands in our laps, thanking Him

And we did it again

And we did it again

Mercy

The one unheated room in hell. The one

unhappy couple in heaven, screaming

obscenities at one another

on a street corner on the loveliest

day of summer:

Once, that was us. Happy anniversary. But

we got older, and the love took over. The

sunken luxury liner of so much.

So long
I’ll never forgive you.

So long
I want to kill you.

What a joke:

An overcoat thrown out of the window

of a moving car. Wounds

to meat. Like

the Gorgon: A terrific

noise invented her.

Followed by silence.

A blaze of radiation

in a bedroom. Our mouths

left open. The way

they knocked the coliseum down

on the other side of town

and built a toy museum.

Little Christian.

Little lion.

Little cage.

Little door left open.

Right this way.

My son practicing the violin

Some farmers with their creaking machinery moving slowly across a field. Some geese. The sun rising somewhere on some unripe peaches. I wander the labyrinth of that orchard. The foxes creep out of their dens to peek at me. Even my high heels are green.

Such love, and such music, it’s a wonder Jesus doesn’t make me spend every waking hour on my knees.

We’ve traveled here from a distant planet to teach you how to be a human being.

Even the paper cup in my hand has learned to breathe. And each note is a beautiful, ancient kingdom precariously balanced at the edge of a cliff above the sea.

Stolen shoes

for the woman who stole my shoes
from the locker room at the gym    

There is blood within the shoe

The shoe’s too small for you

Such is the message in the cleft of the devil’s foot

In the shrine piled high with sandals and pumps

In the shameless laughter of the younger women at Starbucks, leaning back, swinging their legs, full of foam, their cups

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 geese 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