Space, in Chains (7 page)

standing in a line.

The sacred path of that.

Ahead of me, a man in black, his broad back.

Behind me, a woman like me

unwinding her white veils.

And beyond us all, the ticket-taker, or the old

lady with our change, or

the officials with our food, our stamps, our unsigned papers, our

gas masks, our inoculations.

It hasn’t happened yet.

It hasn’t begun or ended.

It hasn’t granted us its bliss

or exploded in our faces.

The baby watches the ceiling from its cradle.

The cat stares at the crack in the foundation.

The grandfather flies the sick child’s kite higher

and higher. I set

my husband’s silverware on the table.

I place a napkin beside my son’s plate.

Soon enough,

but not tonight.

Ahead of us, that man’s black back.

Behind us, her white veils.

Ahead of us, the nakedness, the gate.

Behind us, the serene errand-boy, the cigarette, the wink-

and-nod, the waiting.

Beyond that, too late.

Receipt

The cat rips the couch to pieces with the claws he’s forgotten he no longer has. Air, so much heavier than memory, which returns again and again to its nurseries, and factories, and sweetly winding garden paths. Outside, in the sky, a plane filled with the traveling dead soars by.

The couch has been torn to pieces, scattered in ruined fragments all over the floor. What the cat once curled upon. What the cat will lie upon once more.

How lucky to be spared from one’s own impulses.

And how terrible.

The way, myself, this afternoon, cleaning out a drawer, I came upon the receipt for that wrecked thing we used to love, and also found unbearable.

Life support

A planet made of only ocean

and the only boat on that ocean loaded only with mirrors and stones

Foil wrapped around a tragedy

The tragedy, wrapped in foil

A tragic voice inside a brick, and also the brick

Let me out

Let me in

Why
not
the Victorians and their sentimental grief-wreaths woven from a loved one’s hair?

Gall bladder, as goblin

Liver as dirty pet

Lungs panting like featherless squabs in a net

The spleen, that bloody jokester

The stomach, Brueghel’s monkey on a chain

The heart hacked out of the center of an overgrown hedge with an ax

To live beyond the brain:

A sack of feathers, claws, and fingernails

Turn the corner, and there she is:

The pretty little girl who asked you for a kiss you wouldn’t give

That undiscovered country someone scissored from the map:

Now, that’s where you live

Incredible, how it all goes on without you

Behold the torn wrapping paper and the ribbons on the floor

Behold the gifts:

The bees liberated from their hives

buzzing in ashes on the ground

A painting of a passionate embrace

on a broken vase

My memory of your casual smile

This memory, like

a child’s bit of sweet embroidery smuggled

out of an asylum

My father’s mansion

We were adolescents, after school. We prowled the grounds of an abandoned mansion. It was a museum devoted entirely to our empty dreams. Except that we were simply, still, golden, steaming shapes against the snow, and then the green. And this abandoned mansion was the mind, exposed, like the guts and excrement of an animal in the road. The pear tree had gone crazy. The one carp in the pond had starved. A boy I loved climbed onto the roof of the mansion and pounded on his chest. He shouted down, “I’m King Kong!” and then, thinking even harder about the situation we were in, shouted even louder, “No. I’m God!”

Heart/mind

A bear batting at a beehive, how

clumsy the mind

always was with the heart. Wanting

what it wanted.

The blizzard’s

accountant, how

timidly the heart approached the business

of the mind. Counting

what it counted.

Light inside a cage, the way the heart—

Bird trapped in an airport, the way the mind—

How it flashed on the floor of the phone booth, my

last dime. And

this letter

I didn’t send

how surprising

to find it now.

All this love I must have felt.

Riddle

Most days I cling to a single word. It is a mild-mannered creature made of thought.
Future,
or
Past.
Never the other, obvious word. Whenever I reach out to touch that one, it scurries away.

Even my identity has been kept hidden from me. It is a child’s ghost buried in mud. It is an old woman waving at me from a passing train. First, a multiplication. Then, a densification. Then, a pale thing draped carelessly over a bone.

Four weeks after my conception, I was given a tail. But then God had some mystical vision of all I might be—and took the tail back.

It required no violence, no surgery, no struggle, this quiet thievery, this snatching away of the deep, ancient secret. It would be true of everything:

My eyes closed, hands open,
Take it, take it.
Then, every day wasted chasing it.

Love poem

The water glass. The rain. The scale

waiting for the weight. The car.

The key. The rag. The dust. Once

I was a much younger woman

in a hallway, and I saw you:

I said to myself

Here he comes.

My future’s husband.

And even before that. I was the pink

throbbing of the swim bladder

inside a fish in the River Styx. I was

the needle’s eye. I was the air

around the wing of a fly, and you

had no idea you were even alive.

Tools and songs

Behind the apple trees, beyond the house, in the neighbor’s field, beneath a starless sky, at the edge of the woods, on a night in February, after the ice storm, but still a few hours before the terrible news, I hear the coyotes howling those excited prepositions that are

art and government and bad decisions.

Fishhooks, arrowheads, knitting needles, and the small dull words that connect these scrawny godless dogs and their dogless gods to me.

In my kitchen. In my nightgown. In my role as mother and wife. My hand on the teapot, an orangutan’s. My bare feet on the floor, a chimpanzee’s. I have a few simple tasks I can do without tools that were not given selflessly to me—as the coyotes out there laugh and hiccup and confess it all:

The rabbit and the barn-cat and the quivering mole. The wild geese and the old woman’s poodle and the child’s pet sheep. A few decades’ worth of shameless memories in the mind of someone’s thankless daughter.
God, please—

Give me a set of simple tools out of which to fashion a song for these.

Home

It would take forever to get there

but I would know it anywhere:

My white horse grazing in my blossomy field.

Its soft nostrils. The petals

falling from the trees into the stream.

The festival would be about to begin

in the dusky village in the distance. The doe

frozen at the edge of the grove:

She leaps. She vanishes. My face—

She has taken it. And my name—

(Although the plaintive lark in the tall

grass continues to say and to say it.)

Yes. This is the place.

Where my shining treasure has been waiting.

Where my shadow washes itself in my fountain.

A few graves among the roses. Some moss

on those. An ancient

bell in a steeple down the road

making no sound at all

as the monk pulls and pulls on the rope.

About the Author

Laura Kasischke (pronounced Ka-Z ISS-kee) was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She attended the University of Michigan, where she received her B.A. and her M.F.A. in creative writing. She is now an associate professor there, in the Residential College and the M.F.A. program, and lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son. A writer of fiction as well as poetry, she has published eight novels, two of which have been made into feature films—
The Life before Her Eyes
and
Suspicious River
—and eight books of poetry. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes.

Lannan Literary Selections

For two decades Lannan Foundation has supported
the publication and distribution of exceptional literary works.
Copper Canyon Press gratefully acknowledges their support.

LANNAN LITERARY SELECTIONS 2011

Michael Dickman,
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Laura Kasischke,
Space, in Chains

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Valzyhna Mort,
Collected Body

Dean Young,
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