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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558493520 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Massachusetts Press |
| Publication date: | 06/20/2002 |
| Series: | Juniper Prize for Poetry |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dance and Disappear
By Laura Kasischke
University of Massachusetts Press
Copyright © 2002 Laura Kasischke.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-55849-352-2
Kitchen Song
The white bowls in the orderly
cupboards filled with nothing.
The sound
of applause in running water.
All those who've drowned in oceans, all
who've drowned in pools, in ponds, the small
family together in the car hit head on. The pantry
full of lilies, the lobsters scratching to get out of the pot, and
God
being pulled across the heavens
in a burning car.
The recipes
like confessions.
The confessions like songs.
The sun. The bomb. The white
bowls in the orderly
cupboards filled with blood. I wanted
something simple, and domestic. A kitchen song.
They were just driving along. Dad
turned the radio off, and Mom
turned it back on.
Day
It was a day—a bit
of camouflage cloth
through which the sun could shine.
I decided to hang the laundry
on a line. It was another day
in my civilian life. Monday, the day
of lost keys. Tuesday the breathing sweetness
of macaroni and cheese. When I
heard my son's sheets slapping
at the breeze, I turned around.
The sound
of soldiers
marchingthrough the trees.
Wednesday
is the sparrow's day, she
nests in the place where the shingles
have broken away from the eaves
in a home she's made for herself
out of Kleenex
and twigs.
The bus
is yellow.
It goes and comes
bearing the small
laundry of my son.
Thursday, a star
falls out of the sky as I
wheel the child's bike
to the garage—the garage, which is a darkness
like the father
of my son, glittering
with wrenches, the smell of rags and oil. He keeps
a hat he wore in the jungle
hanging from a nail on the door. Friday
the clouds
part above the highway leaving
a ragged hole
in my clean sky. The laundry
on the line, how like our lives! As if
something of ourselves
could be left behind, hanging
in the sun, taking
our places, bearing
our vague shapes
long after we've stepped away, wearing
other lives on other days. Shadows, pants, on Saturdays
the library's stone lions run
freely through the streets.
We have to lock the doors.
We have to stay inside. But
by Sunday morning, they've come back, and see
how emptily they stand
very still and very quiet
side by side, side by side.
Buffalo
I had the baby in my arms, he was asleep.
We were waiting for Old Faithful, who was late.
The tourists smelled like flowers, or
like shafts of perfume moving
from bench to bench, from
Gift Shop to Port-o-Pot. The sun
was a fluid smear in the sky, like
white hair in water. The women
were as beautiful as the men, who
were so beautiful they never needed
to see their wives or children again.
It happened then.
Something underground. The hush of sound.
I remembered
once pretending
to have eaten a butterfly
My mother held my arms hard until
I told her it was a lie
and then she sighed. I've
loved every minute of my life!
The day I learned to ride a bike
without training wheels, I
might as well have been riding a bike
with no wheels at all! If
at any time, I'd
had to agree to bear
twenty-seven sorrows
for a single one of these joys ...
If the agreement were that I
had to love it all so much
just, in the end, to die ...
Still, I can taste those wings I didn't eat, the sweet
and tender lavender of them. One
tourist covered her mouth
with a hand
and seemed to cry. How
could I have doubted her?
There were real tears in her eyes! The daisies
fell from her dress, and if
at that moment
she'd cracked an egg in a bowl,
the bowl would have filled with light. If
there is a God, why not
this violent froth, this
huge chiffon scarf
of pressure under water under her
white sandals in July?
The baby was asleep, still sucking, in my arms, a lazy
wand of sun moved
back and forth across his brow. I heard a girl's laughter
in the parking lot, soft
and wild as
the last note of "Jacob's Ladder"
played by the children's handbell choir.
I turned around.
It had been watching me. Or him. Or both of us.
Good beast, I whispered to it
facetiously under my breath.
It took, in our direction, one
slow and shaggy step.
Clown
It was summer, and the clown had come
to the same restaurant to which we'd come
for a piece of strawberry pie.
Big white smile.
Wig of fire.
The sun had begun to set
with a piece of gold in its mouth.
There were devils in the dumpsters eating flies.
What's that? the three year old asked.
I said, She is a clown.
Time had begun to pass so fast I felt
as if the weekly newspaper came to our house every day, yet
I had a photograph of myself
in which I'd blown my bangs back, wanting
to have wings like an angel, or Farrah Fawcett
when what I had was hair
that made me look in this photograph
like a girl who'd lived for a while
in another century, on a distant planet.
Someday my children would laugh.
She's not a woman, the three year old said
of the clown. There were
white seeds blowing around in the evening breeze
without a plan, landing their fluff-craft in
the Big Boy parking lot, onto the hoods of cars.
A man puts a gun to your head and demands
your child, what should you do? That's
the kind of early summer night it was.
The kind of night in which, perhaps,
you have a last moment
to look around and laugh—at
the child, and the clown, and the pie, and the fact
that if each atom could be collapsed
into a sphere no bigger than its core, all
of the Washington Monument could be crammed
into a space no bigger than an eraser.
How modest were your desires!
In the order of things, it's true
a clown is last, but all of us are futile
when it comes to want
and stupid to look at in a restaurant.
Excerpted from Dance and Disappear by Laura Kasischke. Copyright © 2002 by Laura Kasischke. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
What People are Saying About This
Laura Kasischke handles earthly subjects adeptly even while making visionary leaps. [She] can recall James Wright, Randall Jarrell, or Jorie Graham, but she resembles none for long. Volatile, sometimes shocking, and seamless, her poems greet, tame, or confront the trials of puberty, medicine and marriage.... Balancing the quotidian with the estranging, fluent sentences with tumbling stanzas, and tenderness with anger, Kasischke shows as superb a feel for the bravura enjambments as for single details. Poems plummet into apparent melodrama, pull out of it, and then pull off (like stunt flyers) — maneuvers that depend on those perilous dives.