Space, In Chains Read online

  I will wear it over the face.

  Summer

  She drank too much

  She was after

  Some meadow

  Some orchard

  Some childhood night with the window open, and it was summer, and her own mother was humming in another room, and through the screen the fuzzy blue, and suddenly she was out there swimming, too, in softness, a permanent candle, invisible, beautiful.

  She drank too much

  For many years

  Some stairs

  Some cosmetics

  Once

  I stood in the threshold and watched her disintegrate before a mirror.

  My lovely mother before a tray full of bracelets

  (Repeat: My lovely mother before a tray full of bracelets)

  She invited me in to fish the ice cubes from her drink. They were warm. On my tongue. Such calm. Like a small bomb detonated in an isolated barn. Like a beloved pet in the middle of a busy street, simply standing there, looking around.

  The organizers

  That was the winter the organizers

  got so businesslike about your death,

  all the little Swiss watches glittering

  so efficiently in the snow

  The dice and the lots and the shuffled decks—

  Goodbye to all that

  It had been decided, been planned, precisely

  even to the day, and to what you would be wearing, and to the last

  word you would say, to the music on the radio at the nurse’s station

  For what purposes, then, the denial (that

  bag of damp paperbacks and expired medications

  shining and smudged in their amber vials)

  Except that it was mine

  And still I walk the sidewalk mumbling

  something about how it will all be fine

  Fine is its own crazy village on the Rhine

  Fine is the name of the cuckoo-clock maker

  Fine is the word the cuckoo cries

  every hour after hour on the hour—

  scrambling out of its dark little hole

  like something being chased with a knife by Time

  Four men

  1

  Too late.

  The gods of old Greece

  have been reduced to this

  disease, stuffed

  into a dusty cupboard

  in a kitchen full of shit.

  I used to scramble after that on my hands and knees.

  I used to beg for it over and over.

  If not for the longing

  and the ire, and the long day tethered to your ankle by a chain—

  would you have come home earlier, and sober?

  2

  Men differ:

  locally, and wither. We

  sat up all night

  arguing.

  Men are the same:

  the universe, and live forever. We

  slept in each other’s arms all day.

  3

  For a while you wore

  your bloody regalia

  everywhere you went. All

  muscle and movement wrapped

  in a damp scarlet blanket. Crowded

  offices, and wide-open spaces.

  I couldn’t take it.

  I told you a tasteless joke, and you hated it.

  I wanted to see

  what would happen if I took down your fortress

  nail by nail. Then

  brick by brick. My

  warm breath on your neck.

  I told the joke again.

  4

  Furious rain on a furious lake.

  The year of our waste.

  Ashes in an ashtray in a burning bar,

  and a man holding a woman made of bad moods in his arms.

  I made a mockery of you.

  You made a laughingstock of me.

  A subtle love. The heart. Its

  iambic, jellied waves.

  Who knew those bees were making

  honey of our grief? Who knew

  that the workmen,

  hired to be fair, would knock down the airy

  wall one morning

  between us

  and neither of us would be there?

  Briefly

  Here and there some scrap of beauty gets snatched from this or that: One child’s voice rising above the children’s choir. A few wild notes of laughter passing through the open window of a passing car. That pink handkerchief waved at the parade. The tiny Nile-blue tile broken at the edge of the mosaic—all shining accident and awe. And this

  last second or two of dreaming

  in which your face

  returns to me completely. Not

  even needing to be, being

  so alive again to me.

  They say

  one-twelfth of our lives is wasted

  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

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  LANNAN LITERARY SELECTIONS 2011

  Michael Dickman, Flies

  Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains

  Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

  Valzyhna Mort, Collected Body

  Dean Young, Fall Higher

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  W.S. Merwin, Migration: New & Selected Poems

  Taha Muhammad Ali, So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971–2005,

  translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin

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