Laura Kasischke
Day
It was a day--a bit
of camouflage cloth
through which the sun could shine.
I decided to hang the laundry
on a line. It was another day
in my civilian life. Monday, the day
of lost keys. Tuesday the breathing sweetness
of macaroni & cheese. When I
heard my son's sheets slapping
at the breeze, I turned around.
The sound
of soldiers
marching through the trees.
Wednesday
is the sparrow's day; she
nests in the place where the shingles
have broken away from the eaves
in a home she's made for herself
out of Kleenex
and twigs.
The bus
is yellow.
It goes and comes
bearing the small
laundry of my son.
Thursday, a star
falls out of the sky as I
wheel the child's bike
to the garage--the garage, which is a darkness
like the father
of my son, glittering
with wrenches, the smell of rags and oil. He keeps
a hat he wore in the jungle
hanging from a nail on the door. Friday
the clouds
part above the highway, leaving
a ragged hole
in my clean sky. The laundry
on the line, how like our lives! As if
something of ourselves
could be left behind, hanging
in the sun, taking
our places, bearing
our vague shapes
long after we've stepped away, wearing
other lives on other days. Shadows, pants, on Saturdays
the library's stone lions run
freely through the streets.
We have to lock the doors.
We have to stay inside. But
by Sunday morning, they've come back, and see
how emptily they stand
very still and very quiet,
side by side, side by side.
From Dance and Disappear, University of Massachusetts, 2002.