Caitlin Scarano: There Is No Ending
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
I know we’re all sick of poems with deer but let me explain
Last night: a forest of hospital beds
I want to ask all these strangers: do you ever think every day you’re getting closer to your death or do you wake in the morning with hope crusted in the corner of your eyes, your teeth already grinning at the air?
Grief is a very complex machine, it told me so itself, a matrix
that takes years
A. to navigate
B. from you like teeth
Dear J, I have a few acres all to myself now, you should see them
I’m sorry you had to turn so many stones
while I looked on at a careful distance
The male human heart at age 36
Who knew, I guess
It’s true that I didn’t mind the horses starving outside my window, as long as they
came when called, as long as they were gentle with their teeth
I mean, I had many apples going to rot, what else could I have done
I read about how the water in Lake Superior is replaced every 191 years
Remember the spot where I dove under and was rolled by a wave and for a moment I did not know what was up or down, what was past or present, you or—
That winter, the lake froze, trace lines of cracks in the ice colliding, the fractures in my body all met
In another dream, you’re in front of me—solid, tangible, with a dark beard and corduroy pants
I ask you about dying and he you say, Let’s go to this city I know
Then you disappear into a tangled forest and I follow, stumbling, ripped by thorns
You’re always just out of reach, always just turning the next corner
Remember those children we watched while we ate ice cream on that green bench in Sault Saint Marie? Silly
that isn’t my favorite memory of you, not by far but it’s the one I keep
coming back to
I took it so I should have wanted it
But the sugar made my teeth ache
Every memory is two-sided, like that day we lay in the grass watching ships pass through the lochs
Distance is deceptive
It was sunny, the photos you took prove it
But the wind—
Or the wind and the rain that day we met at the lighthouse, you wore a black sweater, I hadn’t seen you
in years, you looked younger, time doing its mirror trick
The scene draws us
We weren’t ghosts but we were
both adrift, though only one of us knew it
When I reach the city you spoke of, it’s been abandoned for decades
Every memory is two-sided, like the time you were driving and the Jeep hit
black ice and spun out
Like the time I was driving and my car died as we coasted down hill
In a human dream, electric blue hydrozoan creatures blossom in the Superior’s deepest water
Every memory is two-sided, and nothing is mine to claim
I run these dirt trails near my house, I think of you, I touch my chest, count my breaths
One day I came upon this mother dear and two fawns, they were tiny, spotted, legs so ready to give out but they did not give out
J, you should have seen them
Generational, Domestic
I drink from the cup that made me
before blood congeals across the top.
Touch the muscles of your back
while you sleep. What does cruelty express?
A fear so deep it creates its own
gravity, the world pours in around
the rim. Despite how light clawed, it could not
get out—not after, not from within. I live by a river
and dream of living by another river. Throw my baby
teeth into it like coins in a well. Wish and watch
water pass, think of how it bows and braids,
think of the circulatory system, nervous
birds on loop. My niece appears in a dirt-stained
dress holding yellow zinnias as they blossom
and rot, blossom and—Does movement remind you
of death or escape? When you bite the inside
of my thigh, what memory of violence
unfurls like a seed? Generational, domestic. Your mother
tells you she prays for us and I swallow
it whole like a duck egg. A blue mud wasp
taps against my window, where its always
been. While we sleep, bindweed inches up
the walls and ceiling. Coils around the lamps.
Tomorrow, we’ll eat the heads of morning.
A Litany of Dreams You May Borrow
The one where I pick sunlight off my skin like scales or sequins
Or I have a boy’s torso and a jaw
that doesn’t lock when I start to laugh
Any of the dreams with snakes or my mother trapped in a radiator vent
because they spring from the same well
My little sister and I are teenagers again, still speaking to each other, and she climbs a sugar maple and never comes back
The ones where rain comes through the roof but not the ones where it is snowing in my room
S. and I still live together but a gray horse circles the house, starving
No one names it
My father is in a hospice bed, holding up his rot-dappled organs one by one
as offerings to me
The cow pasture
where I’m in a wedding dress carrying a pitcher of his blood
B. and I are back on the beach at night and she kisses me except this time ocean is made of milk and sweet
No one invents sin so we sun ourselves on the rooftop
Any dream of my grandfather—that skull for a face, the parrot watching on, the white sheet and long fingernails
In fact, you may keep them, convince yourself there is a lesson
The dream where the brakes gave out
The dream where the brakes gave out
His head is in my lap and the window is open even though it is January outside
A war between nations of men takes place in my mother’s dining room
My sisters and I watch from beneath a table
Those you can leave: any dream where he says my name
aloud or his mouth is against my hair, any dream
where the dead forgive
The first girl I loved asking Are you sure you don’t know me? until she disappears
The whole room slants and I fall from the bed to the wall as if the house is trying to shake me from itself like a parasite
The dream I had after S. found the knife I hid beneath the nightstand
The one where I saw our sons using sticks as swords, their mouths yellow
and chose not to have them
The first gentle boy from my childhood is back and we are in love
When the church burns down and my sisters and I are blamed
The one where what I love is not unwell, not in need at all, so I shrink to the size of a kitchen ant and crawl away
My mother is my daughter and when she speaks, hummingbirds fill her mouth like arrows
The one where I actually forgive him and he leans back then, rests his eyes, says
There is no ending
Alessandra sends me two pictures of her son eating his first strawberry
while I’m home alone reading about central sleep apnea because this morning Calvin woke me up at 5AM by rubbing my back because (he said) I kept holding my breath and he is afraid (but doesn’t say) that I might stop breathing all together. On our jog today Cara told me that she’s going to try dating again and there isn’t much out there so she’s meeting a corporate lawyer all the way in Seattle for lunch on Thursday. Part of me is jealous—to get to meet strangers that you might have sex with or raise a puppy with is to feel very specifically alive right? The internet says I cannot suffocate in my sleep. I have this one memory of when I’m four or five and my father is sitting in the tub and I just let myself in to the bathroom and ask him how often he clipped his toenails and he laughs like kids are so fucking werid and says and said Maybe once a week? When we can’t stop worrying about each others deaths this is how I know we need each other. I can’t remember Alessandra’s baby’s name even though I met him once when we were in Portland. I don’t want children but one time on a long drive I imagined a three or four year old kid in the backseat of my Subaru asking me smart and weird kid questions and me giving honest answers and developing this whole lifelong relationship with a human like there is a way to never be lonely. I was startled by a sound but it wasn’t really a sound just a door closing in my body. I didn’t tell Calvin about it. Instead we talked about our little sisters and how we’re scared for them. The internet says my brain will panic and wake me up. I tell him I want him to confide in me but what do you say to I have a very real fear that the next time I hear about her it could be that she’s dead. I get it at least somewhat—what it means to see a boat drifting away from you. The last time I saw M she was more angry than any person I can remember it was like being beside a live wire I wasn’t sure if I could speak if I could even ask her if she was okay without making her not okay like the whole world is made of string and it can unravel if you say or even think the wrong thing. I don’t think there is a way to never be lonely. In the pictures the baby’s fingers are red and his laughing and sitting on a checkered picnic blanket and it looks like real summer in Wisconsin. I don’t really want to date strangers again. Everyone good I’ve found I still don’t know how I kept them. Some days I don’t want him to leave the house for fear of what might happen next. I remember when M and I were little she was hardly ever mad just withdrawn and we were there like two islands beside each other never really able to say what we meant or needed and now my mother calls me and she’s just painted the trim in the living room mountain air white and she starts to cry thinking about thirty years in the house where she raised us that she wants to sell and I say You haven't left yet and she says I’m already gone. Calvin just texts his sister now even though he knows he won’t get a response and I imagine those messages floating in a black void with stars because it all goes somewhere. I write back Don't you wish you could remember your first strawberry? The interest promises me I’ll take another breath.
The mountain has no childhood to speak of
and no child to soothe. Thought it might tell you something
of its formation, even though it does not remember.
Or that there is no universally agreed upon definition
of a mountain. It would speak less about light
and ascension and more about its insides. I have veins,
the mountain would say, a circulatory system of sorts
but no organs. The mountain would predict your disappointment.
It would refuse your offer for a brain and a heart. Knowledge
and loneliness, the mountain would explain, pass from sky
to water to stone. Mountain embodies strangeness, thus has no notion
of strangeness. Mountain understands destination.
It has been desired. It knows you
think it’s trapped; that it has never left and will never leave.
But, if we let it speak, it would tell you: I have touched
every corner and crevice of this carved valley. Has seen so much
come and go—loon, kingfisher, lynx. The people that
tried to erase people. Mountain has hounded
wander. But will have nothing to say about hunger.
If you sit with it long enough, mountain might admit, I am afraid
of dying. Of the slow wearing, the slow away. Wind and water.
Mountain will teach you a word that means both companion
and destroyer. Though it does not sleep, mountain dreams,
of being ripped out by the roots. Mountain wonders
if mountains bleed.
Caitlin Scarano is a poet based in northwest Washington. She holds a PhD in English (creative writing) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She was selected as a participant in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program. Her debut collection of poems, Do Not Bring Him Water, was released in Fall 2017. Her work has appeared in Granta, Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, Carve, and Colorado Review. You can find her at caitlinscarano.com
