Quotes from Laura Kasischke

and a table in a kitchen at which the nightingales feasted on fairy tales, the angels stuffed themselves with fog

Like a twentieth-century dream of Europe—all horrors, and pastries—some part of me, for all time stands in a short skirt in a hospital cafeteria line, with a tray, while in another glittering tower named for the world's richest man my mother, who is dying, never dies.

He felt certain that if she'd have let him, he could have levitated with her in his arms and they could have made love on the ceiling. He could have unzipped his body and wrapped her in his skin. He could have buried himself in her neck and slipped into the place between her shoulder and her throat, and been soldered by passion to her forever.

The wind has toppled the telescope over onto the lawn: So much for stars. Your brief shot at the universe, gone.

It is some water lilies and a skull in a decorative pond, and a tiny goldfish swimming like an animated change-purse made of brightness and surprises observing the moment through its empty eye.

There, tonight. The eternity of that. Swan logic. Swan history.

I was there, where the pale words, like light on a wave. Where the forgotten music was still played. The lovers, gone. Their beds unmade.

The urgent warnings: The dreamy terror of certain summer mornings.

Believable, chronological, but so quickly erased that it only serves to prove that the universe is made of curving, warping space.

The physical universe and its buzzing machinery, its fantastical scenery.

That to want to succeed is to fail

There is dancing and laughter in hell, an angel weeping openly on a park bench in heaven. My mother, dead and frantic in an attic. A white shirt on a floor. An old man in a wheelchair, rubbing his eyes. Here it is, here it is! the occupational therapists sing as they rise to the surface of the earth, smiling, bearing their terrible surprise.

They were all around us that day. In the confusion of air. In our strange dreams. In the baggage we'd brought with us and would have to leave. In our fading animal memories: The humming gold of being, and ceasing to be. The exposed motor of eternity.

as if we were actual human beings or completely normal people

So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the very air around us bound by chains.

And my wildly troubled love for you, which labored gently in the garden all through June, then tore the flowers up with its fists in July.

She is ancientness. She has lived forever. It has driven her insane.

Not the bureaucrat's stamp on the folder of our fate. But a knot nonetheless, and not of our making.

They told us it was a dance, a party, a pageant, so we ran laughing together straight into the disaster.

Fragrant, dreaming, unreal, and having to do, terribly, with love.

I, who am doubt now, with a song .

The self on tiptoes sneaking away from the self.

We would never be together in this life again.

A man in the massive shadows of the columns of the Museum of Griefs-to-Come.