Laura Kasischke

I still keep it hidden in the jar of  saltwater you gave me     don’t worry, no one can hear me, my husband’s in the bathroom & my daughter’s in her bedroom wearing those headphones made of sponges on her ears yes, I’ve kept it all these years, and kept it hidden, but — I have to tell you something: something about it has changed recently     has changed     since the last time we talked     the shell has opened, and — calm down      please      I’m about to tell you     I’ve waited years to tell you     how?     how could I have called you?     I don’t know where you live: I don’t even know your name! so     I’m telling you now: the gluey seam that held it closed     at some point it began to dissolve     I don’t know     around Christmastime, I suppose     but it was gradual     subtle     not something easily seen through water, through glass      so perhaps it started earlier than that, but that’s when I first noticed — (of course it’s still alive     I know because I know) so     after the seal first began to loosen, things accelerated after that     and I could see inside of  it     and what I saw was a tongue     but very pale     the tongue was white, in fact, and thin as a strip of paper     also smooth     no bumps or grooves     but there was no doubt: this was a tongue I’m sorry    I used the past tense only so that you might understand how it appeared to me when it was new and strange     to describe to you what I saw then     not because it’s changed     because it hasn’t      except in its familiarity I spend an hour with it every morning      and if the weather’s mild, after they’ve gone to bed, I take it out at night, lie on my back in the grass, hold the jar on my chest, and together we watch the metallic flower petals spin at each other in that dangerous memory of  heaven, or the past    please     don’t cry    no one’s to blame     and nothing’s ruined, nothing’s wrong      there’s no discomfort      there seems to be no pain     there’s only time, letting something looser     and I’ve made the preparations     it will die when I die no, she isn’t listening    and if  she is     well, then the eavesdropper’s punishment is hers      she can’t be spared      all her life spent holding her breath    only to hear     the sound absorbed by moss stuffed into the ears of  a stillborn kitten      all her life     over and over again at the kitchen table     playing the tapes of a conversation she recorded with a microphone slipped into a coffin thirty-six years ago     finding no meaning in those     and searching for the jar in which she’s certain it still floats      the tongue of  her mother’s ghost

That dream of a cricket in the dark of the night at the foot of the gallows tree. Virtuous cricket. Little, hopeful heart- shaped face lit up by the moon. Little, hopeful, insistent song about the future sung to a hanged man’s boots.

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.