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Laura Kasischke
Happy birthday
for Jack
It required oblivion. Forever. And then an apple tree. And then the pain of the woman who bore the child, who bore the child, who carried the seed, who carried the seed...
The way a fish is water granted life. The way air and earth spark into a beetle. The gem-in-a-hurry of that.
But slow. Eternity, and numberless equations, over and over before your particular several embodiments and costumes could be chosen. The shipwreck, the storm, the plague. (Oh, I have survived. Now I will be a whisper someday in the features of a stranger—never seeing the world again, although he will see all of it through my eyes.) The near-miss of existence. The brain in the skull—soft container of everything. The ghastly apple on that tree's branch. And then the mind, weighing nothing at all.
Who knows, really, what it really required? The way a bird is made of energy and unlearning suddenly in the sky. And the snake in the lawn is cleverness, a bit of cyclone, but with the density of a genetic song:
Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Though there can be no birthday, darling, for you have been here all along.
Still life
Midwinter gathered around a table. The smell of tarnished silver rising from their sweaters. Mother has placed a platter of clouds at the center. Father cirlces with a dipper, heavy with cold water. And, always, a dog asleep on a rug. Exhausted, having just ravished an exhausted slipper.
But, where are their souls?
(Shadows gathered hastily in a basket.)
And where are their names?
(Mammals asleep for long soft seasons in their dens.)
And, my god, where are their faces?
How terrible that this, the most beloved, would be the first to go.
Their smiles, their eyes, softened, emptied hospitals and post offices floating in so much smoke, full of strangers. Horizons, histories, heathery hills, pages of books read through tears—made featureless as speeding drivers, runners, leapers, though no one has moved in this memory for thirty years.
about Laura Kasischke
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