Space, In Chains Read online

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.

&
nbsp; 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

  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 corne
r 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