The Infinitesimals. Laura Kasischke

no seats. This

      engineering feat of

      gravity and wings, which

      flies on superstition, irrationality. The calm

      has been printed on my ticket:

      Doe and fawn

      in a grove below us, her

      soul crawling in and out of my clothes.

      While, in a roofless theater, a magic act

      is performed for children

      by an invisible man.

      Like the mess

      of a cake that I once

      baked for my father—

      damp, awful, crumbling layers.

      Soggy church bell on a plate.

      And my father’s dentures, lost

      (all his teeth

      pulled out

      as a young man

      by a military dentist im-

      patient to send him

      on his way), and

      my father’s smile anyway.

This Is Not a Poem/Fairy Tale

      Sixteen years ago in northern Michigan, somewhere in the Huron National Forest, a man and a woman from a nearby town pulled over to the shoulder of the road, took their two-year-old son, asleep, out of the backseat, walked with him into the woods a mile or so, and set him down.

      It was still light enough for them to find their way back to their car. God help us, they went home.

      These people. Drugs were involved, we must suppose. Some kind of profound stupidity made greater with desperation. (Although it isn’t possible to have sympathy for them, one still searches for some explanation.)

      Did they sleep that night? Were they startled when the phone by the bedside rang?

      Well, they confessed the whole thing the next day after the child was found walking (“toddling,” the finder called it) along that shoulder of the road. A policeman recognized him from his own child’s day-care center. And he was a “smart little guy. He knew his name.” This much was in the paper.

      Everything else you have to imagine for yourself in order to survive, as he did. In order to survive it, you have to imagine it every day. When you lie down to go to sleep, and when you wake. But, in between—

      In between, your mind is full of trees.

      And it’s quite dark despite the moon.

      But this summer’s been a warm one.

      And someone tied your tiny shoes for you.

How New a Summer Night

      Windows in prisons.

      Plastic trees.

      Taxidermied birds. How

      new a summer night seems

      when you’re eighteen.

      No such thing as fate, as

      in the bedroom

      your mother folds

      your father’s undershirts. When

      last we met, you and I, we

      were in my dream, and still

      the sun managed

      to penetrate the depths. We

      stood around in silence, as if underwater. Your

      feet were in cement, but I was free to leave. Do

      you remember

      how you tried

      to cling to me?

      But, if I learned one thing from Red Cross that

      summer, it was

      that you must shake off

      the one who’d hold you under.

      Remember how, above you, that

      membrane closed itself

      so smoothly after me?

That Men Should Kill One Another

      It is the bread that will not be baked.

      The bread that rises and continues to rise.

      It is the recital performed every night—

      little girl

      in a snowstorm

      in an empty auditorium. Not the soldier

      on a horse, bearing

      a skull on a pole. No, it is the way

      I call your name, many

      years too late, just

      your dark omnipresence now as it stretches

      from one edge of the everything to the next.

The First Trumpet

      In a bedroom down the road

      some boy practiced taps

      so slowly his slow tune

      became a single note.

      He was the Understander.

      He was the Knower.

      I was the village on the hillside

      hastily nailing its doors closed.

      He was my father in the driveway

      refusing me the keys. Saying

      nothing. Holding. Holding. I

      was the exasperated girl in the top cut too low.

      There was a party.

      I wanted to go.

      He was the army holding

      that hillside. He

      was that army’s wounded soldiers

      crawling home:

       No.

At the End of the Text, a Small Bestial Form

      This is the glimpse of the god you were never supposed to get.

      Like the fox slipping into the thicket.

      Like the thief in the night outside the window. The cool

      gray dorsal fin in the distance. Invisible

      mountain briefly visible through the mist

      formed of love and guilt.

      And the stranger’s face hidden in the family picture. The one

      imagining her freedom, like

      the butterfly blown against the fence

      in her best yellow dress

      by the softest breeze of summer:

      To have loved

      and to have suffered. To have waited

      for nothing, and for nothing to have come.

      And the water like sleek black fur combed back that afternoon:

      The young lovers rowed a boat. The