Laura Kasischke

ONE WORLD AT A TIME

This is the one in which
the sky is blue
and the seed holds inside it
the tree’s many
possibilities. And you
work by day
and by night you sleep
abandoning
the miraculous
five days of every week.
Someone invented foghorns
before we got here, along
with tinfoil, griefcake, lostkeys.
Bones in the earth
to prove there was a past:
Tyrannosaurus Rex, the
elderly—how
eventually our shoes seem
farther away from our
selves on our feet
while the hawk of it all
casts her crucifix on a field.
Passing as speech. Smooth
as thought through water.
Missile
of being, parting the nothing
briefly . . .
So, baby in a buggy, tell us
what you see:
I see
Hand like an island
and silver swarm behind my eyes.
Perhaps this is the mind?
Below it, strangely
a tender container
with a breath inside it
and a programmed death
which appears to be mine—
Or to be me.
Everything else
leafy and green.

LAURA KASISCHKE has published nine collections of poetry, most recently The Infintesimals (Copper Canyon, 2014). She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.