Space, In Chains Read online

  Space, in Chains

  Books by Laura Kasischke

  POETRY

  Space, in Chains

  Lilies Without

  Gardening in the Dark

  Dance and Disappear

  What It Wasn’t

  Fire & Flower

  Housekeeping in a Dream

  Wild Brides

  FICTION

  Eden Springs

  In a Perfect World

  Be Mine

  The Life before Her Eyes

  White Bird in a Blizzard

  Suspicious River

  YOUNG ADULT FICTION

  Feathered

  Boy Heaven

  LAURA KASISCHKE

  Space, in Chains

  Port Townsend, Washington

  Copyright 2011 by Laura Kasischke

  All rights reserved

  Cover art: Mark Rothko, Number 8, 1952. © 2010 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  Copper Canyon Press is in residence at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, under the auspices of Centrum. Centrum is a gathering place for artists and creative thinkers from around the world, students of all ages and backgrounds, and audiences seeking extraordinary cultural enrichment.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kasischke, Laura, 1961–

  Space, in chains / Laura Kasischke.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-55659-333-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3561.A6993S63 2011

  811´.54-dc22

  2010040037

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 FIRST PRINTING

  Copper Canyon Press

  Post Office Box 271

  Port Townsend, Washington 98368

  www.coppercanyonpress.org

  for Lucy & Jack

  Flying swiftly past,

  For a child I last forever,

  For adults I’m gone too fast…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship that supported the completion of this book, as well as United States Artists for a generous USA Cummings Fellowship.

  Thank you to the editors of the following publications, in which these poems originally appeared:

  The Adirondack Review: “Stolen shoes”

  Boston Review: “Mercy”

  Chautauqua: “My son makes a gesture my mother used to make”

  Conduit: “Cytoplasm, June”

  Dunes Review: “Dawn,” “Lunch,” “O elegant giant (These difficult matters)”

  Field: “Landscape with one of the earthworm’s ten hearts”

  Gulf Coast: “The key to the tower,” “Your headache”

  Harvard Review: “Abigor”

  Hayden’s Ferry Review: “Space, in chains”

  The Iowa Review: “The call of the one duck flying south,” “Song”

  The Kenyon Review: “At the public pool,” “My beautiful soul”

  The Laurel Review: “Animal, vegetable, mineral, mist”

  Luna: “You”

  The Missouri Review: “My father’s mansion”

  Narrative: “Atoms on loan,” “Life support,” “The photograph album in the junk shop,” “Tools and songs”

  New American Writing: “O elegant giant (And Jehovah)” (Reprinted in The Pushcart Prize XXXIV)

  New England Review: “Almost there,” “Rain,” “Riddle (I am the mirror),” “Riddle (Most days),” “They say”

  New Letters: “Four Men” “Riddle (Mars, the moon)”

  Poetry: “After Ken Burns,” “Hospital parking lot, April,” “Look”

  POOL: “Recipe for disaster”

  Puerto del Sol: “The Pleasure Center”

  Redivider: “Forgiveness”

  Salamander: “Pharmacy,” “Receipt”

  Smartish Pace: “Dread”

  The Southern Review: “Memory of grief,” “My son practicing the violin,” “Swan logic,” “We watch my father try to put on his shirt”

  TriQuarterly: “Riddle (The bodies of the girls),” “The sweet by-and-by”

  Willow Springs: “Near misses”

  When I came in my son said, “Mother, something has come down from Mars and the world is coming to an end.” I said, “Don’t be silly.” Then my husband said, “It is true.”

  Bury deep

  Pile on stones,

  Yet I will

  Dig up the bones.

  What am I?

  CONTENTS

  One

  O elegant giant

  Riddle

  Memory of grief

  Song

  Time

  After Ken Burns

  My beautiful soul

  The photograph album in the junk shop

  Landscape with one of the earthworm’s ten hearts

  The inner workings

  Hospital parking lot, April

  View from glass door

  July

  Wasps

  Dawn

  Look

  Rain

  Peace

  Pharmacy

  Medical dream

  Near misses

  The key to the tower

  Space, in chains

  We watch my father try to put on his shirt

  The call of the one duck flying south

  Two

  Your headache

  Space, between humans & gods

  Swan logic

  Riddle

  The drinking couple, similes

  Your last day

  O elegant giant

  At the public pool

  My son makes a gesture my mother used to make

  Recipe for disaster

  Atoms on loan

  Dread

  Wormwood

  The sweet by-and-by

  Thanksgiving

  Mercy

  My son practicing the violin

  Stolen shoes

  Passion-in-July

  Cigarettes

  Cytoplasm, June

  Riddle

  Three

  The knot

  Animal, vegetable, mineral, mist

  Riddle

  Confession

  You

  Abigor

  Forgiveness

  Pain pill

  Almost there

  The Pleasure Center

  Lunch

  Trees in fog

  Summer

  The organizers

  Four men

  Briefly

  They say

  Receipt

  Life support

  My father’s mansion

  Heart/mind

  Riddle

  Love poem

  Tools and songs

  Home

  About the Author

  Space, in Chains

  ONE

  O elegant giant

  And Jehovah. And Alzheimer. And a diamond of extraordinary size on the hand of a starving child. The quiet mob in a vacant lot. My father asleep in a chair in a warm corridor. While his boat, the Unsinkable, sits at the bottom of the ocean. While his boat, the Unsinkable, waits marooned on the shore. While his boat, the Unsinkable, sails on, and sails on.

  Riddle

  I am the mirror breathing above the sink.

  There is a censored garden inside of me.

  Over my worms someone has thrown

  a delicately embroidered sheet.

  And also the child at the rummage sale—

  more souvenirs than memories.

  I am the cat buried beneath

  the tangled ivy. Also the white

  weightless egg

  floating over its grave. Snow

  where there were leaves. Empty

  plastic cups
after the party on the beach.

  I am ash rising above a fire, like a flame.

  The Sphinx with so much sand

  blowing vaguely in her face. The last

  shadow that passed

  over the blank canvas

  in the empty art museum. I am

  the impossibility of desiring

  the person you pity.

  And the petal of the Easter lily—

  That ghost of a tongue.

  That tongue of a ghost.

  What would I say if I spoke?

  Memory of grief

  I remember a four-legged animal strolling through a fire. Poverty in a prom dress. A girl in a bed trying to tune the AM radio to the voices of the dead. A temple constructed out of cobwebs into which the responsibilities of my daily life were swept. Driving through a Stop sign waving to the woman on the corner, who looked on, horrified.

  But I remember, too, the way,

  loving everyone equally because each of us would die,

  I walked among the crowds of them, wearing

  my disguise.

  And how, when it was over, I found myself

  here again

  with a small plastic basket on my arm, just

  another impatient immortal

  sighing and fidgeting in an unmoving line.

  Song

  The floor of the brain, the roof

  of the mouth, the locked

  front door, the barn

  burned down, a dog

  tied to a tree, not howling, a dark

  shed, an empty garage, a basement

  in which a man might sip

  his peace, in peace,

  and a table

  in a kitchen

  at which

  the nightingales feasted on fairy tales,

  the angels stuffed themselves with fog

  And a tiny room at the center of it all,

  and a beautiful woman the size of a matchstick

  singing the song that ruined my father:

  his liver

  his life

  The kind of song a quiet man

  might build a silent house around

  Time

  Like a twentieth-century dream of Europe—all

  horrors, and pastries—some part of me, for all time

  stands in a short skirt in a hospital cafeteria line, with a tray, while

  in another glittering tower named

  for the world’s richest man

  my mother, who is dying, never dies.

  (Bird

  with one wing

  in Purgatory, flying in circles.)

  I wake up decades later, having dreamt I was crying.

  My alarm clock seconds away

  from its own alarm.

  I wake up to its silence

  every morning

  at the same hour. The daughter

  of the owner of the Laundromat

  has washed my sheets in tears

  and the soldiers marching across some flowery field in France

  bear their own soft pottery in their arms—heart, lung, abdomen.

  And the orderlies and the nurses and their clattering

  carts roll on and on. In a tower. In a cloud. In a cafeteria line.

  See, cold spy for time, who needs you now?

  After Ken Burns

  The beautiful plate I cracked in half as I wrapped it in tissue paper—

  as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it.

  This river, which is life, which is wayfaring. This river,

  which is also sky. This dipper, full of mind, which is

  not only the hysterical giggling of girls, but the trembling

  of the elderly. Not only

  the scales, beaks, and teeth of creatures but also

  their imaginative names (elephant, peacock) and their

  love of one another, the excited

  preparations they sometimes make for their own deaths.

  It is as if some graceful goddess, wandering in the dark, desperate with thirst,

  bent down and dropped that dipper

  clumsily in this river. It floated away. Consciousness, memory, sensory information, the

  historians

  and their glorious war…

  The pineal gland, tiny pinecone in the forehead, our third eye:

  Of course, it will happen here. No doubt. Someday, here,

  in this little house, they will lay the wounded

  side by side. The blood

  will run into the basement through the boards. Their

  ghosts are already here, along

  with the cracked plate wrapped in old paper

  in the attic,

  and the woman who will turn one day at the window to see

  a long strange line of vehicles traveling slowly toward her door, which

  she opens (what choice does she have?) although

  she has not yet been born.

  My beautiful soul

  It is the beggar who thanks me profusely for the dollar.

  It is a boat of such beggars sinking

  beneath the weight of this one’s thanking.

  It is the bath growing cold around the crippled woman

  calling to someone in another room.

  And the arthritic children in the park

  picking dust off summer

  speck by speck

  while a bored nurse watches.

  The wind has toppled the telescope

  over onto the lawn:

  So much for stars.

  Your brief shot at the universe, gone.

  It is some water lilies and a skull in a decorative pond,

  and a tiny goldfish swimming

  like an animated change-purse

  made of brightness and surprises

  observing the moment through its empty eye.

  Thank you, thank you, bless you, beautiful

  lady with your beautiful soul…

  It is as if I have tossed a postcard

  of the ocean into the ocean.

  My stupid dollar, my beautiful soul.

  The photograph album in the junk shop

  We are all the same, it claims. This

  forgotten couple kissing

  before the Christmas tree, in a year

  they will be holding

  the Christ child between them, whose

  name they wish us to believe

  is Jim.

  Someone with a wheel.

  A girl in a purple dress, squinting.

  A wolf

  rolling in ashes. A cake

  bearing the Christ child’s name. The waterfall

  at the center of every life

  spewing foam and beauty

  onto the boats below. And also

  the canyon into which will slip—

  What is this on the rocks below?

  The whole damn picnic?

  And the shadow of that terrible

  animal with horns

  at every petting zoo. And

  the Christ child in a costume

  smoking cigarettes. The poisonous

  brambles in bloom on a chain-link fence. A fat

  man pretends to fly. A blond

  woman laughs at a hand. The scoreboard. The lawn

  mown. The family cat. (Here,

  it is Acceptance. Here,

  Malice.)

  And beside them all, there is

  Grandma

  in a chair

  staring at the future as she tells

  a story without moving her lips. It is

  a story to which the family

  doesn’t listen

  because they are too busy

  doing what families do.

  And because it can’t be true.

  And still

  her face waits on every page

  like an ax left behind on the moon.

  Landscape with one of the earthworm’s ten hearts

  and also a small boy with a
golden crossbow,

  and a white rabbit full of arrows.

  Also snow. And the sky, of course, the color

  of a gently stirred winter soup.

  I am the inert figure behind the barren apple tree.

  The one who wonders for what purpose

  the real world was created. I ruin everything by being in it, while one

  of the earthworm’s hearts, deep in the ground, fills up the rest

  of the landscape with longing, and fiery collisions, and caves

  full of credit cards and catalogues. You can tell

  I hear it, too, by the look on my face:

  That inaudible thumping insisting without believing

  one is enough is enough is enough.

  The inner workings

  This afternoon my son tore

  his shorts climbing a barbed-wire fence. Holy Toledo, I said

  when he crashed back through the cornstalks

  with half of his shorts gone.

  The sun was ringing its sonorous silent bell underground, as someone’s

  grandmother tucked

  an awful little cactus under

  a doily embroidered with buttercups.

  In prisons

  exhausted prisoners napped, having

  brief and peaceful dreams, while beautiful girls in bikinis tossed

  fitfully in their own shadows

  on a beach

  and somewhere else

  in some man’s secret garden shed

  the watchmaker, the lens maker, the radio-

  maker, the maker

  of telescopes, of rhetorical devices:

  The time-maker, the eye-maker, the voice-maker, the maker

  of stars, of space, of comic surprises

  bent together

  over the future

  clumsily tinkering with the inner

  workings of its delights.

  Hospital parking lot, April

  Once there was a woman who laughed for years uncontrollably

  after a stroke.

  Once there was a child who woke after surgery to find his parents

  were impostors.