Space, In Chains Read online

  These seagulls above the parking lot today, made of hurricane and

  ether, they

  have flown directly out of the brain wearing little blue-gray masks,

  like strangers’ faces, full

  of wingèd mania, like television in waiting rooms. Entertainment.

  Pain. The rage

  of fruit trees in April, and your car, which I parked in a shadow

  before you died, decorated now with feathers,

  and unrecognizable

  with the windows unrolled

  and the headlights on

  and the engine still running

  in the Parking Space of the Sun.

  View from glass door

  I have stood here before.

  Just this morning

  I reached into the dark of the dishwasher

  and stabbed my hand with a kitchen knife.

  Bright splash of blood on the kitchen

  floor. Astonishing

  red. (All

  that brightness inside me?)

  My son, the Boy Scout, ran

  to get the First Aid kit—while, beyond

  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

  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.

  Wasps

  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.

  Dawn

  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

  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.

  Rain

  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.

  Peace

  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.

  Pharmacy

  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.

  Medical dream

  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.

  Near misses

  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.

  The key to the tower

  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

  Space, in chains

  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

  Your headache

  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

  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 guill
otine

  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