My Son Makes a Gesture My Mother Used to Make

Laura Kasischke  

from Twentieth Anniversary

My son makes a gesture my mother used to make, the sun in their eyes, fluttering their fingers over their foreheads as if to disperse it. The sun, like so many feverish bees. 

I keep driving. One eye on the road and one on the child in the rearview mirror. A man on the radio praying. That awful kid down the block where I was a child who buried a toad in a jar in the sandbox, dug it up a month later, and it was still alive. 

He does it again. The sun, like the drifting ashes of a distant past, the petals of some exploded yellow roses. 

The miracle of it. 

The double helix of it. 

The water running uphill of it. 

Such pharmacy, in a world which failed her! She died before he was even alive, and here she is, shining in his eyes. 

Light nodding to light. 

Time waving hello to time. The ninety-nine names of Allah. The sun extravagantly bright and full of radiant, preposterous spiritual advice—like a bible rescued from a fire that killed a family of five. I squint into it and see both a glorious parade of extinct and mythological beasts, and an illustration in a textbook of a protective sheath of protein wrapped around a strand of DNA—all cartoon spirals and billiard balls, and the sole hope of our biology teacher, Mr. Barcheski, who, finally enraged by the blank expressions on our faces, slammed it shut and walked away. 

Image © Wolfgang Hasselmann

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Laura Kasischke has published nine novels—three of which have been made into feature length films (starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, Shailene Woodley, and others) and a prize-winning mini-series. She has also published a collection of short fiction, a novella, and eleven collections of poetry. She has been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rilke Award, The Prix Elle (Best Novel Published in 2014), a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Alain Bousquet Award for Literary Excellence, The Bess Hokin Award and many other national and international awards. Her work has been widely translated and published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Granta, The American Poetry Journal, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Review, The Yale Review, Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology, Modern American Poetry, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, New American Poets, Helen Vendler's Poems, Poets, Poetry, among many other literary journals and anthologies. She teaches creative writing in the University of Michigan's Residential College and is Theodore Roethke Distinguished University Professor of English.