Laura Kasischke

For G A small thing crawling toward me across this dark lawn. Bright eyes the only thing I’m sure I see. You’ve come back to me, haven’t you, my sweet? From long ago, and very far. Through crawling dark, my sweet, you’ve come back to me, have you? Even smaller this time than the stars.

One night from the other side of a motel wall made of nothing but sawdust and pink stuff, I listened as a man cried to someone on the telephone that all he wanted to do before he died was to come home. “I want to come home!” That night a man cried until I was ankle-deep in sleep, and then up to my neck, wading like a swimmer or like a suicide through the waves of him crying and into the deep as icebergs cracked into halves, as jellyfish, like thoughts, were passed secretly between people. And the seaweed, like the sinuous soft green hair of certain beauty queens, washed up by the sea. Except that we were in Utah, and one of us was weeping while the other one was sleeping, with nothing but a thin, dry wall between us.

Once, I was as large as any living creature could be. I could lift the world and carry it from my breast to its bath. When I looked down from the sky you could see the love in my eye: “Oh, tiny world, if anything ever happened to you, I would die.” And I said, “No!” to the hand. Snatched the pebble from the mouth, fished it out and told the world it would choke! Warned the world over & over! “Do you hear me? Do you want to choke?!” But how was the world to know what the truth might be?Perhaps they grant you special powers, these choking stones. Maybe

Little tin key lost somewhere in my memory, returned to me in a dream. Like the blue-burning match blowing over the surface of some drunk girl’s sweet, flaming party drink.Happy birthday.

So like the slow moss encroaching, this dark anxiety. In the bricks by now and all along the shaded left side of the house. And the statue, behind her knee. Her ankle, in the cool space between her breasts, spreading in the earliest hours of the morning. Between her fingers. Her parted lips. That black-green whispering.

Small and panting mass Of moonlight and dampness on a log This glistening tumor, terrible frog Of moonlight and dampness on a log My small and panting mass

Recall the carousel. Its round and round. Its pink lights blinking off and on. The children’s faces painted garish colors against an institutional wall. And the genetics. The We won’t be here too long...Do not step off... The carousel? Do you recall? As if we were our own young parents suffering again after so many hundreds of hours of bliss. And even the startling fact that what had always been feared might come to pass: A familiar sweater in a garbage can. A surgeon bent over our baby, wearing a mask. But surely you recall how happily and for how long we watched our pretty hostages go round. They waved at us too many times to count. Their dancing foals. Their lacquered mares. Even a blue-eyed hunting hound was still allowed back then.

Like silent naked monks huddled around an old tree stump, having spun themselves in the night out of thought and nothingness— And God so pleased with their silence He grants them teeth and tongues. Like us. How long have you been gone? A child’s hot tears on my bare arms.

A tail, a torso, a tiny face. A longing, a journey, a deep belief. A spawning, a fissioning, a bit of tissue anchored to a psyche, stitched to a wish. Watery. Irony. Memory. My mother, my face, and then the last thing she’d ever see, and then the last words I’d hear her say:You’re killing me

I thought we were playing a game in a forest that day. I ran as my mother chased me. But she’d been stung by a bee. Or bitten by a snake. She shouted my name, which even as a child I knew was not “Stop. Please. I’m dying.” I ran deeper into the bright black trees happily as she chased me: How lovely the little bits and pieces. The fingernails, the teeth. Even the bombed cathedrals being built inside of me. How sweet the eye socket. The spine. The curious, distant possibility that God had given courage to human beings that we might suffer a little longer. And by the time I was willing to admit that all along all along I’d known it was no game I was a grown woman, turning back, too late.