Laura Kasischke - Space, In Chains

POETRY Space, in Chains Lilies Without Gardening in the Dark Dance and Disappear What It Wasnt 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 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 Im gone too fast

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 earthworms ten hearts Gulf Coast: The key to the tower, Your headache Harvard Review: Abigor Haydens 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 fathers 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, Dont be silly. Then my husband said, It is true.

Bury deep Pile on stones, Yet I will Dig up the bones. What am I?

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.

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?

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.

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 Like a twentieth-century dream of Europeall horrors, and pastriessome 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 worlds 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. (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 armsheart, 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?

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.