No Chronology

Karen Fish

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780226768977
• eBook ISBN: 9780226769028
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In No Chronology, Karen Fish's third collection of poems, she investigates those moments when the boundary of everyday life merges with history, imagination, and art. Fish was trained as a visual artist, and this way of seeing is intrinsic to her approach to poetry. Fish's reflections on art and life speak to our common experiences, and her power to illuminate the subtle complexities of the world around us lies in her keen and compassionate observations. These poems invite us to join her in looking both at and beyond ourselves.

The outside world vanishes. No help comes.
Imagine, staring into the sun, then,
how the clouds spread out and open like wallets
over a few corrugated roofs.
 

Throughout this collection, Fish seeks truths about memory and loss, shame and redemption. She faces uncomfortable questions arising from our individual and collective actions, asking whether we are complicit in extinctions of species and how we reduce the humanity of prisoners by tying their identity to their crime. But these poems are also about naming life's particular joys: driving in spring, walking through the woods with dogs, or hearing a child speak through the mail slot. They offer a space to encounter lyrical meditation as an experience in and of itself.

Alibi

I knew nothing about anything: school, dreams, tornados,

strangers, smoke-filled bars, silent, oblivious mothers,

the teenage girls across the street, swaying and sashaying

through the late afternoons with transistor radios,

leaning in, in through rolled-down windows of the parked cars

of visiting boys. I worried in my not-knowing of iron lungs,

bursting appendix, accidental curse words,

sudden illness, all manners of medical procedures,

the gas chamber, the French Kiss. I knew nothing

about majorettes, although I tossed a baton in the warm

afternoon air. I worried about being accused of a crime

I didn’t commit, switched evidence.

It was a suburban neighborhood of abrupt boys

running, stopwatches, athletic accidents, stitches,

snuck cigarettes, stashed girlie magazines, pogo sticks,

headlocks, handlebars to fall from. Bikes to balance on

the back of while the rider rode standing. I knew nothing

about how any of it worked, paychecks, much less wills?

I thought if a man and woman slept back to back,

that produced a baby.

So I worried about bunking up with my brother on vacations.

I worried we’d somehow without our knowing

be some taboo bride and groom. I thought sex might involve

the belly button, no—maybe, maybe—you drank something,

a guy’s urine? My not-knowing showed itself walking to school—

when girls from blocks over would stop for me, remind me,

you know nothing.

I knew nothing about the origin of the creek,

what to do forgotten at the frozen pond,

evidenced by my walking home

two miles in my ice skates,

only to get in trouble for dulling the blades.

I knew nothing about traveling fathers, sad oblivious

mothers, wasp nests in sheds, how to pay attention,

little experiments with fire, how to inhale, why,

why people moved, were quiet or not,

pleased or explosive, math, foreign languages, good

and evil, cause and effect. It all always seemed so arbitrary.

I jumped from the high bars, and my knee hit my chin,

and my teeth went through my tongue.

Like time-lapse photography, I was healed in two days.

Bats circled at night when we jumped

from swings in the trees.

Most days we built dams on the outskirts,

moved rocks, rerouted water, made pools, so pleased with

the splicing, forking, all the effort and strategy, sliding

eventually into sleep like otters off glossy rocks.

The Russians were racing us to the moon.

Tangled in blankets, I fell out of bed and broke

my collarbone—tangled in blankets,

I screamed myself awake from dreams immediately forgotten

to watch Late-Night with my father smoking and drinking in the living room.

I knew nothing about bras, thought breasts conical

and hard like those of statues.

I didn’t know how to do reading problems,

simple distance and time, calculate—join the girl scouts,

get beyond a simple stitch, match plaids in sewing class.

I didn’t know about Saturdays when my father would use a haircut

as his excuse to swing by a bar before noon;

I just knew I’d end up there in that basement bar

downtown again. My brother singing while I did the twist

in my plaid wool skirt to twist later on the stool

with my Shirley Temple to twist dutifully

into the house sideways shimmying past my mother.

I carried a bag from the hardware store. As if

that was why we went out!

He pretended he needed a few nails,

handful of odd screws, maybe a can of turpentine.

I’d slide through the small space first—between my mother

holding the door and the doorjamb.

My mother’s full lips a hard line.

Coming over the lawn,

my father and brother laughing.

Visiting

Back to the elderly relatives our father took us—

Betty Wherry, retired assistant to Senator Smith,

who lived for years in DC, then with her ancient blind mother

at the beach—Uncle Paul and Aunt Minnie, childless in decorum,

insisting we dress for breakfast, had run a travel agency

in Boston for the wealthy when the Victorian trip meant

seeing the world—worldwide arrangements—

Paris, Egypt, Rome, and Hong Kong.

My brother and I, quiet, were afforded freedoms, silent

in our browsing—closets, bedrooms, the shelves beside the fireplace

with museum quality artifacts to indicate a past—having been somewhere.

Always cocktail hour somehow—a cocktail hour

that sailed surely right over dusk, dinner was just crackers

topped with the cursive of Cheez Whiz.

Silent, in my respectful good behavior, I paid attention—

the blind look that indicated elderly listening—the thin braceleted arms

parceling out the peanuts, refilling the glass companionably

with the warm ginger ale—the speckled hands—the occasional Band-Aid—

contusions purple-pretty under the thin skin—the speckled necks—

the birdie ankles—the eyeglasses and the canes.

How could one live on the coast and not go in?

Why—why . . . the beach but not the beach?

The surf too rough to chance—the uneven bottom—

invisible riptide.

Eventually standing up to my narrow hips in soupy clots of seaweed,

stomach slapped by each impossibly bitter wave, I knew—

I knew my body—knew my body would surely

never, never be theirs.

Location, Location

The photographs came out of the bottom drawer

of my grandmother’s secretary—sea captain reclined with watermelon,

spinster sisters in a meadow, Uncle Charles (who ran the brothel)

on the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• First Teacher
• Ars Poetica
• Orphan
• Alibi
• Visiting
• Location, Location
• This
• The Accounting
• That Feeling
• From the Road Walking
• The Cistern
• Flames Behind Your Head
• Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew
• The Round-Up
• Seen from Far Away
• The Close of Winter
• Depth of Field: Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow
• Black Bough
• Evening Song
• From Another Past, This Past
• Another Republic
• Do You Believe in the Afterlife?
• Training
• The Kitchen
• The Dream
• Divorce
• November
• The Starfish
• The Women’s Prison
• The Greyhound
• What We Need
• The Stand-In
• Love
• Driving in Spring
• Notes