SPACE
STRUCK
SPACE STRUCK
PAIGE LEWIS
Copyright © 2019 by Paige Lewis
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lewis, Paige, 1991– author.
Title: Space struck : poems / Paige Lewis.
Description: First edition. | Louisville, KY : Sarabande Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019006381 (print) | LCCN 2019009647 (e-book) ISBN 9781946448453 (e-book) | ISBN 9781946448446 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
Classification: LCC PS3612.E973 (e-book) | LCC PS3612.E973 A6 2019 (print) DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006381
Cover image © Joachim Bandau
Untitled, 2006
watercolour on paper
30 x 22.5 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Nicholas Metivier Gallery
Cover and interior design by Alban Fischer.
Manufactured in Canada.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
for Kaveh
So while they journeyed up that sloping road,
the Sibyl told her story to Aeneas;
they exited the underworld at Cumae,
and there Aeneas offered customary
sacrifices, then landed on the shore
that, as yet, did not bear his nurse’s name.
—OVID, Metamorphoses, Book XIV
I hear eternity
Is self-forgetting.
—LYNN XU, “Earth Light: I”
CONTENTS
I.
Normal Everyday Creatures
On the Train, a Man Snatches My Book
No One Cares Until You’re the Last of Something
Saccadic Masking
The Foxes Are Back
Because the Color Is Half the Taste
The Moment I Saw a Pelican Devour
When I Tell My Beloved I Miss the Sun,
When They Find the Ark
I Love Those Who Can Walk Slow Over Glass and Still Keep
My Dear Wolfish Dreamboat, Stand Still
II.
The Terre Haute Planetarium Rejected My Proposal
On Distance
God Stops By
Where I’m From, Every House Is a House with an Obstructed View
You Be You, and I’ll Be Busy
St. Francis Disrobes
In the Hands of Borrowers, Objects Are Twice as Likely to Break
Turn Me Over, I’m Done on This Side
Golden Record
Chapel of the Green Lord
Diorama of Ghosts
Space Struck
III.
You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm
I’ve Been Trying to Feel Bad for Everyone
The River Reflects Nothing
Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself
God’s Secretary, Overworked
Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest
Magic Show
So You Want to Leave Purgatory
Royal I
Notes
Acknowledgments
I
NORMAL EVERYDAY
CREATURES
I’m going to show you some photos—
extreme close-ups of normal, everyday
creatures. A patch of gray fur, half
a yellow eye. When you guess each creature
right, you guess each creature into being.
Soon you’ll have enough to open a zoo,
and people will visit because it’s not every day
they get to see everyday creatures in cages.
Oh, of course your zoo will have cages!
Otherwise you’ve just got world around you
and who’s going to pay for that? Your father?
Actually, let’s not talk about fathers,
they are boring and offer clumsy advice
on toothpick drawbridges, on soothing
saw grass wounds, on wearing the same pair
of underwear four days straight like the Boy Scouts.
I was never a Boy Scout, though I did dream
of pinewood derbies and being afraid
of the forest. I might ask you one day to go
camping, and if you have the desire to dance.
Please, when we finish spinning, aim me toward
the river. Once, while jumping from stone
to stone, I slipped into the river and scared
a snake from his underwater hiding place,
and though he did not wisp his tongue at me,
though he made no rude remarks about
my bony feet or the house I was raised in, I
wanted to harm him. I was frightened—
I thought I knew where everything belonged.
I do know the snake does not belong in these
photos. It is not an everyday creature. I can tell
you this because this is my game—I’m allowed
to give hints. And if, for some reason, you don’t
belong in this space with me, getting fingerprints
all over my glossy animals, then we’ll journey
until we find the world in which we both fit.
And when the path grows too dark to see even
the bright parts of me, have faith in the sound
of my voice. I’m here. I’m still the one leading.
ON THE TRAIN, A MAN
SNATCHES MY BOOK
On the train, a man snatches my book,
reads the last line, and says, I completely get you,
you’re not that complex. He could be right—lately
all my what ifs are about breath: What if
a glassblower inhales at the wrong
moment? What if I’m drifting on a sailboat
and the wind stops? If he’d ask me how I’m
feeling, I’d give him the long version—I feel
as if I’m on the moon listening to the air hiss
out of my spacesuit, and I can’t find the hole. I’m
the vice president of panic, and the president is
missing. Most nights, I calm myself by listing
animals still on the Least Concern end of the
extinction spectrum: aardvarks and blackbirds
are fine. Minnows thrive—though this brings
me no relief—they can swim through sludge
if they have to. I don’t think I’ve ever written
the word doom, but nothing else fits.
Every experience seems both urgent and
unnatural—like right now, this train
is approaching the station where my beloved
is waiting to take me to the orchard, so we can
pay for the memory of having once, at dusk,
plucked real apples from real trees.
NO ONE CARES UNTIL YOU’RE
THE LAST OF SOMETHING
Someone squealed about the ivory-billed woodpecker
nesting on my back porch, and now there’s a line
of binoculared men holding buckets of mealworms
and pushing their way into my home. I let them in
because I’d rather be host than hostage and really,
how could these lovers of
redheaded grub-slurpers
be bad? They sport such splendid hiking shorts.
They press their noses against my sliding glass door
and ask for the woodpecker’s name. I didn’t give him
one—worried that if I named him, he’d never leave,
and honestly, I haven’t been a fan since I watched
him raid a blue jay’s nest for breakfast. Well, I didn’t fully
watch—most of what I see, I see through the gaps
in my fingers. This sort of looking has turned me
boring—even the sun’s been sighing, Not you again,
when it sees me. And I’m sure there’s an alternate
universe where my gaze is unwavering, where I’m paid
to name the newest nail polish colors—Fiddlehead
Green, Feral Red, Geothermal Glitter—where
I don’t hate documentarians for letting nature be
its gruesome self. But I’m stuck in this one, listening
to the demands of birdwatchers—they want postcards
and T-shirts, they want me to build an avian-themed
carousel in the middle of my living room. I want them
to leave. At midnight, I turn off the porch light,
and they swear they can still see inside his nest.
Someone asks, Doesn’t he look happy? Yes, they
all agree. Don’t you think he sounds like Fred Astaire
with his tap-tap-tapping? Of course! Dresses like him, too.
I don’t know if it’s the hunger, the heat, or the hours
of not blinking that turns them cultish, but I go with it.
I ask, Shouldn’t he have a break from your surveillance?
They nod. Yes, a break! I’m giddy at the thought
of being alone. I say, It’s time to go home and rest.
They remove their shoes and lie down on countertops,
in closets, and underneath my staircase. Wherever
there’s space, they fill it—body against tired body—
pressed close as feathers.
SACCADIC
MASKING
—a phenomenon where the brain blocks out blurred images created by movement of the eye
All constellations are organisms
and all organisms are divine
and unfixed. I am spending
my night in the kitchen. There
is blood in the batter—dark
strands stretch like vocal
cords telling me I am missing
so much with these blurred
visions: a syringe flick, the tremor
of my wrist—raised veins silked
green. I have seen the wings
of a purple finch wavering
around its body, stuck, burned
to the grill of my car, which means
I have failed to notice its flight—
a lesson on infinities, a lesson I
am trying to learn. I am trying.
Tell me, how do I steady my gaze
when everything I want is motion?
THE FOXES
ARE BACK
So this is water without your mouth-oil
ghosting the surface. How much must I
swallow before I can say that the foxes
are back, possessing our forest, asking,
Where are your fruits? And since you
brought me the word paradise, I assume
they mean you. What else can I offer?
That thing about boiling frogs isn’t true—
they know what rising heat means
and they will jump out. All my pots
are empty. Can you see the shroud
of hunger, the crease between my
chest that says, Fold here, Cut here?
Can’t you see these pointed ribs want
to tangle—and what of my fruits?
The foxes are lining my windows,
shielding their eyes from the lamplight
with tiny-pawed soldier salutes. They scrape their
teeth against the glass—it almost
sounds like chirping. It almost sounds
like you, skipping stones
across our still-frozen pond.
BECAUSE THE COLOR
IS HALF THE TASTE
it’s a shame to eat blackberries in the dark,
but that’s exactly what I’m up to when a man
startles down the street screaming, The fourth
dimension is not time! He makes me feel stupid
and it’s hard to sleep knowing so little
about everything, so I enroll in a night class
where I learn the universe is an arrow
without end and it asks only one question:
How dare you? I recite it in bed, How dare
you? How dare you? But still I can’t find sleep.
So I go out where winter is and roll
around in the snow until a sharp rock
meets the vulnerable plush of my belly.
A little blood. Hunched over, I must look
like I’m hiding something I don’t want to share.
And I suppose that’s true—the sharp,
the warm wet. The color is half the pain. Why
would anyone else want to see? How dare they?
THE MOMENT I SAW
A PELICAN DEVOUR
a seagull—wings swallowing wings—I learned
that a miracle is anything that God forgot
to forbid. So when you tell me that saints
are splintered into bone bits smaller than
the freckles on your wrist and that each speck
is sold to the rich, I know to marvel at this
and not the fact that these same saints are still
wholly intact and fresh-faced in their Plexiglas
tomb displays. We holy our own fragments
when we can—trepanation patients wear their
skull spirals as amulets, mothers frame the dried
foreskin of their firstborn, and I’ve seen you
swirl my name on your tongue like a thirst pebble.
Still, I try to hold on to nothing for fear of being
crushed by what can be taken because sometimes
not even our mouths belong to us. Listen, in
the early 1920s, women were paid to paint radium
onto watch dials so that men wouldn’t have to ask
the time in dark alleys. They were told it was safe,
told to lick their brushes into sharp points. These
women painted their nails, their faces, and judged
whose skin shone brightest. They coated their
teeth so their boyfriends could see their bites
with the lights turned down. The miracle here