The Infinitesimals. Laura Kasischke

Copyright

        Special Thanks

ONE

       Outside Are the Dogs and the Sorcerers

You’ve Come Back to Me

       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.

The Two Witnesses

      When I saw your body in the world

      I knew exactly who you were, and I

      stared at you

      as you stared at me, both

      of us crawling in through the other’s

      eyes, depositing, then

      leaving.

      You were the one in the bed

      getting ready to leave—incurable

      woman like a broken

      wing

      tucked beneath

      a sheet.

      I was the volunteer girl

      for a few hours the

      day you died.

      You were the woman I would be.

      I was the girl you were.

      And then

      seated at the train window:

      Landscape.

      Damp faces.

      Both of us witness

      to everything.

Who

      Who are these elders

      in their white robes? These

      females and males? These

      royals and ruled? Who

      are these children? This woman beside me? This

      magician, this priest, this meat in this soup, this

      utter conundrum—what

      is it, and where did it come from?

      O Kepler, O Newton, O Darwin, O Driesch.

      What machinery all night, and all day

      what dream?

      And where is my father? I asked and I asked—but I

      was no more than the windmill asking

      questions of its own

      shadow on the grass.

      He was never here, they told me. Your

      father is not in his bed and not in his grave. No one

      has ever lived here

      who answered to your father’s name.

      I insisted. I begged. I tore my hair. They

      gave me sad expressions, then

      tea, then pills, then

      exasperation. We’re

       sorry, but you’re

       terribly mistaken.

      But, having come to visit my father, I

      knelt down in the desert and parted the sands

      to search for the path on my knees and hands.

      I drank from the mirage

      of the pond for an answer until,

      finally, the water lilies asked me:

      Who was your father?

      as they floated there

      all girlish laughter and waxen hands, making

      and remaking themselves without fathers

      out of water and air.

In This Order

      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.

Hurry

      You cannot cross this border

      without your name. Think

      harder, the stone says

      as it slips into the milk, that

      great pale vat out of which

      my mother selected

      the sound of it

      from the same silence

      that surrounds me now.

      Pen in hand. Marble statue

      standing at the center

      of the great museum

      whispering, whispering, without

      needing to move her lips:

       Listen.

      I try, but I

      can’t hear it.

       Hurry.

      The old man

      with tears in his eyes

      watches his old brother hobble

      to the men’s room at McDonald’s.

Mushrooms

      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.

The Invisible Passenger

      Between row 12 and row 14, there

      are,