stanza my stone

gammas & gerunds: Look

gammasandgerunds:

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it’s diamonds now. It’s pearls, public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every fucking magazine on this shelf for free. They tell us that most of the billions of worlds beyond ours are simply desolate oceanless forfeits in space. But logic tells us there must be operas, there haveto be car accidents cloaked in that fog. Down here, God just spit on a rock, and it became a geologist. God punched a hole in the drywall on earth and pulled out of that darkness another god. She—

just kept her thoughts to herself. She just—

followed him around the house, and every time he turned a light on, she turned it off.

—Laura Kasischke, Poetry October 2006 (collected in The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine)