The Infinitesimals. Laura Kasischke
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no seats. This
engineering feat of
gravity and wings, which
flies on superstition, irrationality. The calm
has been printed on my ticket:
Doe and fawn
in a grove below us, her
soul crawling in and out of my clothes.
While, in a roofless theater, a magic act
is performed for children
by an invisible man.
Like the mess
of a cake that I once
baked for my father—
damp, awful, crumbling layers.
Soggy church bell on a plate.
And my father’s dentures, lost
(all his teeth
pulled out
as a young man
by a military dentist im-
patient to send him
on his way), and
my father’s smile anyway.
This Is Not a Poem/Fairy Tale
Sixteen years ago in northern Michigan, somewhere in the Huron National Forest, a man and a woman from a nearby town pulled over to the shoulder of the road, took their two-year-old son, asleep, out of the backseat, walked with him into the woods a mile or so, and set him down.
It was still light enough for them to find their way back to their car. God help us, they went home.
These people. Drugs were involved, we must suppose. Some kind of profound stupidity made greater with desperation. (Although it isn’t possible to have sympathy for them, one still searches for some explanation.)
Did they sleep that night? Were they startled when the phone by the bedside rang?
Well, they confessed the whole thing the next day after the child was found walking (“toddling,” the finder called it) along that shoulder of the road. A policeman recognized him from his own child’s day-care center. And he was a “smart little guy. He knew his name.” This much was in the paper.
Everything else you have to imagine for yourself in order to survive, as he did. In order to survive it, you have to imagine it every day. When you lie down to go to sleep, and when you wake. But, in between—
In between, your mind is full of trees.
And it’s quite dark despite the moon.
But this summer’s been a warm one.
And someone tied your tiny shoes for you.
How New a Summer Night
Windows in prisons.
Plastic trees.
Taxidermied birds. How
new a summer night seems
when you’re eighteen.
No such thing as fate, as
in the bedroom
your mother folds
your father’s undershirts. When
last we met, you and I, we
were in my dream, and still
the sun managed
to penetrate the depths. We
stood around in silence, as if underwater. Your
feet were in cement, but I was free to leave. Do
you remember
how you tried
to cling to me?
But, if I learned one thing from Red Cross that
summer, it was
that you must shake off
the one who’d hold you under.
Remember how, above you, that
membrane closed itself
so smoothly after me?
That Men Should Kill One Another
It is the bread that will not be baked.
The bread that rises and continues to rise.
It is the recital performed every night—
little girl
in a snowstorm
in an empty auditorium. Not the soldier
on a horse, bearing
a skull on a pole. No, it is the way
I call your name, many
years too late, just
your dark omnipresence now as it stretches
from one edge of the everything to the next.
The First Trumpet
In a bedroom down the road
some boy practiced taps
so slowly his slow tune
became a single note.
He was the Understander.
He was the Knower.
I was the village on the hillside
hastily nailing its doors closed.
He was my father in the driveway
refusing me the keys. Saying
nothing. Holding. Holding. I
was the exasperated girl in the top cut too low.
There was a party.
I wanted to go.
He was the army holding
that hillside. He
was that army’s wounded soldiers
crawling home:
No.
At the End of the Text, a Small Bestial Form
This is the glimpse of the god you were never supposed to get.
Like the fox slipping into the thicket.
Like the thief in the night outside the window. The cool
gray dorsal fin in the distance. Invisible
mountain briefly visible through the mist
formed of love and guilt.
And the stranger’s face hidden in the family picture. The one
imagining her freedom, like
the butterfly blown against the fence
in her best yellow dress
by the softest breeze of summer:
To have loved
and to have suffered. To have waited
for nothing, and for nothing to have come.
And the water like sleek black fur combed back that afternoon:
The young lovers rowed a boat. The