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
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,
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.