poetry sunday: space, in chains

Things that are beautiful, and die. Things that fall asleep in the afternoon, in sun. Things that laugh, then cover their mouths, ashamed of their teeth. A strong man pouring coffee into a cup. His hands shake, it spills. His wife falls to her knees when the telephone rings. Hello? Goddamnit, hello?

Where is their child?

Hamster, tulips, love, gigantic squid. To live. I'm not endorsing it.

Any single, transcriptional event. The chromosomes of the roses. Flagella, cilia, all the filaments of touching, of feeling, of running your little hand hopelessly along the bricks.

Sky, stamped into flesh, bending over the sink to drink the tour de force of water.

It's all space, in chains--the chaos of birdsong after a rainstorm, the steam rising off the asphalt, a small boy in boots opening the back door, stepping out, and someone calling to him from the kitchen,

Sweetie, don't be gone too long.


by Laura Kasischke from the book Space, In Chains (2011).

poetry sunday: forgiveness

Mercy, like the carcasses of dead animals in a foyer, being burned.

Fragrant, dreaming, unreal, and having to do, terribly, with love.

The sun shining dumbly all over this world and its troubles. The self on tiptoe sneaking away from the self. In the passing lane today, a woman with her mouth open behind the wheel of her car. Singing, or swearing, wearing a coat, driving through her life, and mine.

Hello, little lifeboat made of straw. Hello, floating multitude of my sins in a basket called Forgiveness on an ocean the name of which my son once mispronounced the Specific.

Hello, ugly memory of myself crouched down with my fists on my thighs yelling at that child:

Something about a stuffed animal and we're already late, and the palsied trees of winter behind me reflected for thousands of miles in his eyes.

by Laura Kasischke from Space, In Chains (2011)

poetry sunday: o elegant giant

These difficult matters of grace and scale:

The way music, our savior, is the marriage of math and antisocial behavior.

Like this woman with a bucket in the morning gathering gorgeous oxymora on the shore...

And my wildly troubled love for you, which labored gently in the garden all through June, then tore the flowers up with its fists in July.

Which set a place for you next to mine--the fork beside the spoon beside the knife (the linen napkin, and the centerpiece: a blue beheaded blossom floating in a bowl)--and even the red weight of my best efforts poured into your glass as a dark wine before I tossed the table onto its side.

Just another perfect night. Beyond destruction, and utterly unlikely, how someone might have managed, blindly, to stumble on such a love in the middle of her life.

O elegant giant. 

While, outside, the woods are silent.

And, overhead, not a single intelligent star in the sky.

by Laura Kasischke from Space, In Chains (2011)

poetry sunday: wasps

Yesterday I took a sublime day trip to nearby Viroqua, WI, and between that and last weekend I have enough photos and stories to blog for two months. Unfortunately iPhoto is giving me issues lately, so these pictures may be a bit slow to emerge. Again, bear with me!
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Wasps: by Laura Kasischke from the book Space, In Chains (2011).

I stumbled into this place with my suitcase packed full of prior obligations. The floor of the orchard littered with soft fruit, and the wasps hovering drunkenly over it all, and the last few pieces dangling from the branches--happiness, melancholy, sexual desire--poised in the vibrating air, ready to fall.

These systems already existed. So what did they want from me? The deep, deep cosmogony. The rigorous mimicry of genes. Algebra, democracy, infectious diseases. Farm implements, logic, religious convictions. A stick in the river. Music. Linguistics. Sweetheart, it's time to leave...

But, first:

A bus ride to the beach! My mother in a striped suit, with black hair. June. A pail full of sand and water. In the distance, someone on a boat, waving. The crippled girl floating on her back. The old man and the silvery blue consummation, laughing happily, up to his ankles, smiling at me. And my dead grandmother and her simple picnic. Some fruit. Cheese. Some cold fried chicken. The physical universe and its buzzing machinery, its fantastical scenery.

They were all around us that day. In the confusion of the air. In our strange dreams. In the baggage we'd brought with us and would have to leave. In our fading animal memories.

The humming gold of being, and ceasing to be. The exposed motor of eternity.

poetry sunday: july

(This Sunday's poetry selection, one day late due to Fourth of July weekend celebrations.)

by Laura Kasischke from Space, In Chains (2011)

July, that lovely hell, all
velvet dresses and drapes
stuffed into a hot little hole.

July trampled by the sweat and froth
of panicked circus animals.
You think, Romantic,
overload. She
exaggerates. Melodrama, menopause, but no:

I was there, when the pale words, like light on a wave.
Where the forgotten ancient music was still played.

The lovers, gone. Their beds unmade. Their
pets in cages. Where the primal. Where the blur.
Where the tamed

bear, the injured bird of prey, maddened nocturnal animals
roaming the streets in the heat of day.

And that girl there:

The chaplain's little book of her, slammed
shut, as she
sits on the front stoop
painting her nails.
Sipping lemonade.
Just that age
when the cool, empty vestibules
are still behind you
in which one day
such desperate bargains
and trades will be made.

poetry sunday: it breaks

Written by Marge Piercy from the book Stone, Paper, Knife (1983).

You hand me a cup of water;
I drink it and thank you pretending
what I take into me so calmly
could not kill me. We take food
from strangers, from restaurants
behind whose swinging doors flies
swarm and settle, from estranged
lovers who dream over the salad plates
of breaking the bones in our backs.

Trust flits through the apple
blossoms, a tiny spring warbler
in bright mating plumage. Trust
relies on learned pattern
and signal to let us walk down
stairs without thinking each
step, without stumbling.

I take parts of your body
inside me. I give you
the flimsy black lace and sweat
stained sleaze of my secrets.
I lay my sleeping body naked
at your side. Jump, you shout.
I do and you catch me.

In love we open wide as a house
to a summer afternoon, every shade up
and window cranked open and doors
flung back to the probing breeze.
If we love long, we stand like row
houses with no outer walls.

Suddenly we are naked.
The plaster of bedrooms
hangs exposed, wallpaper
pink and beige skins of broken
intimacy, torn and flapping.

To fear you is fearing my left hand
cut off. The lineaments of old
desire remain, but the gestures
are new and harsh. Words unheard
before are spat out grating
with the rush of loosed anger.

Friends bear banner headlines
of your rewriting of our common
past. I wonder at my own trust
how absolute it was, part of me
like the bones of my pelvis.
You were the true center of my
cycles, the magnetic north
I used to plot my wanderings.

It is not that I will not love
again or give myself into partnership
or lie naked sweating secrets
like nectar, but I will never
share a joint checking account
and when some lover tells me, Always,
baby, I'll be thinking, sure,
until this one too meets an heiress
and ships out. After a bone breaks
you can see in X-rays
the healing and the damage.

poetry sunday: what's that smell in the kitchen?

Written by Marge Piercy from her book Stone, Paper, Knife (1983).

All over America women are burning dinners.
It's lambchops in Peoria; it's haddock
in Providence; it's steak in Chicago;
tofu delight in Big Sur; red
rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning
food they're supposed to bring with calico
smiles on platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined
but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it's
her husband spitted over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything
it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly
ticking like the heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested,
nothing left but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

poetry sunday: a day in the life

I'm home in Sun Prairie for a weeklong vacation and I thought I had last Sunday's poem set to automatically post but apparently it did not... so here goes, just a little late! Marge Piercy, similar theme to last week's poem. I promise next week's selection will diverge a bit in terms of content. Also, I will be posting quite a bit from my recent thrifting adventures within the next few days!

Written by Marge Piercy in her book What Are Big Girls Made of? (1997)

She is wakened at 4 a.m.
Of course she does not
pick up, but listens
through the answering machine
to the male voice promising
she will burn in hell.

At seven she opens her door.
A dead cat is hammered
to her porch: brown tabby.
Hit by a car, no collar.
She hugs her own Duke of Orange.
She cannot let him out.

She has her car locked
in a neighbor's garage,
safe from pipe bombs,
but she must walk there.
She drives to work
a circuitous guesswork route.

Outside the clinic three
men walk in circles with photos
of six-month fetuses.
They surround her car.
They are forbidden the parking
lot but the police don't care.

They bang on her hood.
As she gets out, they bump
and jostle her. One thrusts
his sign in her face.
She protects her eyes.
Something hard strikes her back.

Inside she sighs. Turns on
the lights, the air
conditioning, the coffee
machine. The security system
is always on. The funds
for teenage contraception,

gone into metal detectors.
She answers the phone.
"Is this where you kill babies?"
The second call a woman
is weeping. The day begins.
A girl raped by her stepfather,

a harried mother with too
many children and diabetes,
a terrified teenager who does
not remember how it happened,
a woman with an injunction
against an abuser. All day

she takes their calls,
all day she checks them in,
takes medical histories,
holds hands, dries tears,
hears secrets and lies and
horrors, soothes, continues.

Every time a new patient
walks in, a tinny voice
whispers, is this the one
carrying a handgun, with
an automatic weapon, with
a knife? She sits exposed.

She answers the phone,
"I'm going to cut your throat,
you murderer." "Have
a nice day." A bomb threat
is called in. She has
to empty the clinic.

The police finally come.
There is no bomb. The
doctor tells her how they
are stalking his daughter.
Then she goes home to Duke.
Eats a late supper by the TV.

Her mother calls. Her
boyfriend comes over. She
cries in his arms. He is,
she can tell, getting tired
of her tears. Next morning
she rises and day falls

on her like a truckload
of wet cement. This is
a true story, this is
what I know of virtue,
this is what I know
of goodness in our time.

poetry sunday: "For two women shot to death in Brookline, Massachusetts"

I've always loved poetry. That adoration has, of course, waxed and waned depending on the poetry I was reading and whether it was self-chosen or dictated by a curriculum, but nevertheless, good poetry is a delicacy, a gift. While reading a really satisfying collection of poetry last month just prior to the creation of this blog, I thought of how much I'd love to share select poems that I find thought-provoking. Hence, poetry sunday.

Lazy Sundays are the perfect day to read a poem, in my opinion. I've decided that each month I'll choose a new poet, and every Sunday in that month I'll type up a poem of theirs that I find especially powerful.

June's poet is Marge Piercy.

I've been drawn to what I would consider Piercy's fired-up feminist poems, plucked from various collections. I've chosen to feature the following poem as the first in the series given that this just happened in the city closest to my heart - Madison, WI. It seems particularly fitting.

Enjoy.

---
"For two women shot to death in Brookline, Massachusetts"

Written by Marge Piercy in her poetry collection What Are Big Girls Made Of? (1997)

How dare a woman choose?
Choose to be pregnant
choose to be childless
choose to be lesbian
choose to have two lovers or none
choose to abort
choose to live alone
choose to walk alone
at night
choose to come and go
without permission
without leave
without a man.

Consider a woman's blood
spilled on a desk,
pooled on an office floor,
an ordinary morning at work,
an ordinary morning of helping
other women choose
to be or not to be
pregnant.

A woman young and smiling
sitting at a desk
trying to put other woman at ease
now bleeds from five
large wounds, bleeding
from her organs
bleeding out her life.

A young man is angry at women
women who say no
women who say maybe and mean no
women who won't
women who do and they shouldn't.
If they are pregnant they are bad
because that proves
they did it with someone,
they did it
and should die.

A man gets angry with a woman who decides to leave him
who decides to walk off
who decides to walk
who decides.

Woman are not real to such men.
They should behave as meat.
Such men drag them into the woods
and stab them
climb in their windows and rape them
such men shoot them in kitchens
such men strangle them in bed
such men lie in wait
and ambush them in parking lots
such men walk into a clinic
and kill the first woman they see.

In harm's way:
meaning in the way of a man
who is tasting his anger
like rare steak.
A daily ordinary courage
doing what has to be done
every morning, every afternoon
doing it over and over
because it is needed
put them in harm's way.

Two women dying
because they did their job
helping other women survive.
Two women dead
from the stupidity of an ex-altar boy
who saw himself
as a fetus
who pumped his sullen fury
automatically
into the woman in front of him
twice, and intended more.

Stand up now and say No More.
Stand up now and say We will not
be ruled by crazies and killers,
by shotguns and bombs and acid.
We will not dwell in the caves of fear.
We will make each other strong.
We will make each other safe.
There is no other monument.