| August 2004
Two poems by Laura Kasischke
Protracted
Absence
Listen to: Protracted Absence  (mp3) (requires audio plugin)
Christ so many little gnats, I thought
they were ashes, or eyelashes, traveling
in a cloud the size
and shape of a mind, tossing
themselves into the candle’s
flame
then settling like a ghastly
snow on the cool
wrinkled surface of my champagne. No.
They aren’t even
gnats:
the dreams of the elderly, memories
of the dead, as if
God had invented thought
from a handful of animated
punctuation marks.
They are a small lost
crowd of tourists wandering
through the sad eternal
tourist trap of the past,
in search of some
trinket that might stand
for the pleasures they had
or failed to have. 1947.
1999. It all
ended at the mouth
of the falls, or the foot
of the mountain, or the ocean’s edge, or in
the steady gaze of the
embalmed
man in a coffin
at Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not Museum.
Yes. The risen
joy and desperation
of the family vacation, all
that was felt and never said
turned to a fine black
mist hovering
over the back
seat of a junkyard station wagon.
Or the wishes
of a fetus
floating in a jar.
Or so much bickering and
love crossing
time zones
on a cell phone.
*********************
The
Second Week of May
Listen to: The Second
Week of May
(mp3) (requires audio
plugin)
What will we buy with
Judas’s money?
Who will live in Hitler’s house? What
shall we do with this
veil stolen
from the murdered bride,
this
blanket lifted from the sleeping child?
I will buy candy,
says the sweetheart.
I will grow here, the primrose sings.
The lightness of silk
in a perfumed breeze, soft
as cashmere, pale pink.
Where can we build
the house of spring,
the one built
on a clear conscience, the one
in which no innocent
civilian has ever been
killed?
Yes. Imagine.
Every day
a clean kitchen, every night a Puritan’s pillow.
But it’s May, and
the lilac
whispers to the wisteria,
Whose shadow shall I wear
this year to the prom? Whose
white scarf sewn from
a virgin’s last breath is this?
About the Author:
Laura Kasischke ’84, ’87 MFA, returned to U-M this
year to join the English department as a lecturer in creative
writing. A poet and novelist, Kasischke is also interested in
contemporary poetics, the contemporary novel, the Black Mountain
Poets and the literature of the Midwest. The volume of poetry Gardening
in the Dark (Ausable Press, Keene NY, 2004) is her most
recent publication. She has also published other volumes of poetry
and two novels, The Life Before Her Eyes, (Harcourt,
2002) and White Bird in a Blizzard (Hyperion, 1998).
She is the recipient a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship,
the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers (NYU Press), Beatrice Hawley
Award, Juniper Award (Univ. of Massachusetts Press) and the Alice
Fay DiCastagnola Award (Poetry Society of America).
In reviewing Kasischke’s novel
The Life before Her Eyes, fellow U-M poet and author Keith
Taylor: “One critic recently said something to the effect
that Laura Kasischke is one of the premier ‘image makers’
of our time. That critic was referring to her poetry, but there
are moments of prose in this novel that will live on in any reader’s
imagination: empty chairs rocking on a porch, a little girl at a
zoo, the beauty of young bodies — almost every page has something
that will not fade.”
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