This impulse to go, to stay, to rush after it, and to turn away. This life like the table set for celebration on a glacier melting a little more every day. And candles to be lit on a cake, and someone who has never been happier beside someone who cannot bear to look into the happy one’s face.
And a park full of boys on skateboards and old men on benches today. And one mother parting the candles’ flames with her bare hands to search for a child behind the science and the saving. Look
at this mess! Surgical gowns and silver instruments littering the floor of this
place. Your child’s hand has turned into a mirror. Your child holds a hand up to your face.
48 The Paris-American
Laura Kasischke received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her most recent collection of poems, SPACE, IN CHAINS. She has also published eight novels. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.