KATHLEEN OSSIP on

Susan Wheeler
What Memory Reveals

Angels, pulled into light—provoking the air, fall
here. You are served a fallow breakfast;
you must stir your juice. Outside, on Columbus Avenue,
a momentary lunge convenes a traffic burst.
 
This is not what was intended when they took you to your first
photo session, swaddled. But intent is a ruinous composite.
 
There were several years of careful steps across
lower Manhattan. A looming sail in a nightmare,
a poolhall, crisscrossed by rudimentary reliefs.
Mayonnaise in a refrigerator door.
 
You stepped forward, into light, onto a green lawn dotted with tumblers
and the hum of Minnesota cicadas. Everywhere a firm rejoinder waved.
He whispered the simplest, pettiest of comforts. Your dress alit.
 
A fat man bends beneath the beaker’s proximity.
 
Freakish, the two that burst into your room where you
were gathering privacy frantically, phonetically.
Burnish (they are flying) regulation (appointments a
calamity of rosewood)—or perhaps they said
furnish the nation. This left a hole, that left a lacking,
and he, the dog, had it too.
 
Now, Thalia rearranges the glove compartment.
On the right, there is a quiet flapping, a whirring
or a wheel joint, in a bright and terrifying night.
 
It was time that altered monster genes. Pressed to the rear of a
new elevator toward a model apartment, you started with the sail
with the tremoring that troubles you still. Like the murderer
who only dreamed, you can’t shake catastrophe’s history.
Your cuff, straightened now, is white against your suit.
The cordialities confirm.
 
Diving into water, his wings conflated. Business
is damage.
 
What have you pricked, a tourniquet hamstring
under a revolver of lights?
 
A Lone Ranger replies. There is a waffling like a tournedos
of bundled wings. An egg drops out.
 
You pay for your breakfast and its litanous menu,
scrambled.
There is earth enough to fill each car,
each open mouth yawing in the light
on Columbus Avenue.
























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Kathleen Ossip’s most recent book of poems is July. She is also the author The Do-Over, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2011; and The Search Engine, selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared widely in such publications as The Washington Post, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The Believer, Poetry, Paris Review, Story Quarterly, and many others. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and she has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.