“You see,” Mrs Whatsit had said, “If a very small insect were to move from the section of skirt in Mrs Who’s right hand to that in her left, it would be quite a long walk if it had to walk straight across.”

Mrs. Who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together.

“Now, you see,” Mrs Whatsit said, “It would be there without that long trip. That is how we travel.”

Without Mrs Whatsit guiding me through higher dimensions, I had to stop every few sentences to draw brackets around scientific language or to write in curlicues in the margins. By the end of the introduction I read that light could be wave-like and particle-like, but could not behave as both a wave and a particle at the same time. I read that there was no compelling theoretical reason why neutrinos had to be massless, a notion I committed to memory and used later that year on a high school field trip to Fermi Lab. “Why are neutrinos massless?” I asked, to which the responder raised an eyebrow and answered simply that there was no theoretical proof regarding the masslessness of neutrinos, why had I asked?

I read about the so-called lepton, the unstable muon, the heavier-but-still-unstable tauon, and a branch of mathematics called topology, that involved stretching and shrinking, but not breaking the form of a geometric object. By the time I entered the math program in college and was asked to prove that any discrete topological space was Regular, the number of string theories had begun to shrink. What had, all along, been thought of as differing theories, were turning out now to be different ways of looking at the same thing.

Excavators strip-mined the surrounding hillsides. Bulldozers pushed aside broken timber. Rigs drilled holes through boulders, which miners filled with nitrogen fertilizer and then detonated. Acid and silt leaked into the creeks. Sometimes people’s front yards caught on fire. Coal combusting flammable gasses, gasoline rainbows stretching into the sky.

A light coat of ash settled over Adena’s 585 people, four bars, filling station, funeral home, and fire hall where, on a clear and frozen February night, Chickenwater and the Shiftin’ Shantys, all red faced and gasping, belted out the local favorite, “Throw Her Down The Mineshaft (So I Can Be Single Again).”

And from beneath a card table weighed down by whiskey bottles and elbows of old men playing euchre, I watched my father polka.

Dad was tall and handsome and strong. When he punched people, they went down. At thirty-five, his muttonchops and thick, tousled hair had already turned completely grey. He said the ladies liked it that way. He gave the dim patches a sparkly boost by shampooing with a rinse called Frivolous Fawn.

When Dad was a teenager, he and his buddies used to beat the crap out of each other every weekend inside a makeshift boxing ring in the basement of his boyhood home. Using his mother’s ball of clothesline, Dad roped off a square section of the cracked and uneven concrete floor. He put old wooden folding chairs in two of the four corners, drew a big X in the middle of the square with white chalk, and laced-up a pair of black leather boxing gloves. Three neighborhood buddies would take turns pummeling each other until their bare-chested bodies glistened with sweat. There was rarely blood, but plenty of bruises, and Dad and his friends wore the contusions like badges.

Dad never had a formal lesson. Instead, he learned the basics from listening to boxing on the radio. The Cavalcade of Sports broadcast Friday night matches on the NBC Radio Network in the late 1940s. St. Nicholas Arena in New York City was the venue for the earliest bouts. To a 14-year old boy from a working class family outside a Pennsylvania steel town, New York might as well have been New Delhi, Amsterdam, or Emerald City. And the announcers calling the punches were Dad’s faraway boxing teachers, describing each mighty wallop, each cutting blow with vivid words in hyper- pitched detail, drawing diagrams in my father’s head. In his mind’s eye Dad couldsee the quick in-and-out action of a left jab, the perfect angle of a devastating right cross, the gloves-against-the-chin technique of defending yourself from an opponent’s ferocious flurry to the head. Dad sat alone on the floor just a few feet from the cloth-covered speaker of the family’s big Philco console radio, developing black-and-white mind photographs of dangerous punches and dancing feet. His eyes stayed closed, his hands punched at the air, and he swayed and jerked his head as if in a tango with the
announcer’s words. When the weekends came Dad would reenact what he imagined, delivering strikes to the bodies of the boys who stepped inside his homemade ring. Dad was not a big kid. He stood only about five-and-a-half feet tall. But he had a stocky, muscular body, and broad shoulders with biceps and forearms that had been hardened by the routine of daily push-ups. It was what was between the ears that seemed to separate him from the others. Dad was not a strategic, competitive fighting genius. But he had demons rattling in his head, stirring in his gut that had nowhere else to go but straight out through his gloved fists.

Dad’s father never asked for a divorce. His mother never would have agreed to it anyway. So when his father left to live with the woman in the house a block away, he was still married to my grandmother and he was still, at least biologically, Dad’s father. And before his father moved out, during the early rounds of basement boxing, Dad must have sensed the widening distance between his father and mother. He must have suffered the inner numbness that comes from sitting at silent dinner tables, trying to block out the arguments that rumbled through the house as he lay on his bed at night with his eyes closed and his hands over his ears. And in a house where stoicism was revered, crying not permitted, and the daily discipline was based on the basic rule of do-what-I-say, Dad must have had nowhere else to release his emotions than inside a boxing ring. He let all the anger, resentment, fear, and sorrow gather in his gut and then it let it burst out in the controlled violence of a basement brawl.

Dad stopped boxing in the basement after a few years, but he never lost his love of a good fight.

Still, as much as Dad loved listening to what gave him a musical kick, what he really wanted was to be able to play an instrument well enough to be called a musician. He’d listen to the big Magnavox console hi-fi stereo in our home, point to the speakers and say, “I want to be able to do that.” That was usually the twinkling sound of piano keys, the strum of a banjo, or the snappy sax or horn in a Rat Pack melody.

It wasn’t as if Dad was ignorant about musical instruments. He could knockout a pretty solid version of Chopsticks on the piano and he knew a one-handed, ten-note ragtime lick. He could also blow a little Chicago-style harmonica, playing the same simple blues notes over and over. But his best performance came from an unlikely instrument: a four-string ukulele. It was a beat-up dark brown soprano version, the smallest kind made. I don’t know how Dad came to own the ukulele. Maybe someone gave it to him; maybe he bought it. But the uke, as he called it, was always within arms reach, leaning against…<--read more @ Shaking Lit –>

It was the boy’s first time inside and he thought it was a joke. There were televisions in the pads and hot showers and some mug served you a plate of food in the evening which was more than he got at home.

I don’t see what you pussies have to moan about, he said.

The next day they burnt out his cell.

The boy had a habit of making people jumpy. His face was pale, narrow so that you felt like you only saw one side at a time. He couldn’t stay still. He twitched, tapped his foot, drum rolled his index fingers. The officers saw it and wanted him off their wing.

That one’s a walking itch, they said.

They stuck the boy in Seg.

We call it bullying son, it’s for your own protection.

He wrestled and spat at them and they had to carry him off the landing above their heads.

I ain’t a fucking victim, he shouted, you get me?

Segregation was for grasses and snakes, junkies who couldn’t hold it together or who ran out on a deal. You couldn’t see them but you knew they were there. At night they talked in code, speaking in a language thieved from the playground that sounded to him like a bunch of spastics. The boy kicked on the door for an officer.

Tell the paedos to shut the fuck up, he said.

The officer flipped the spy hole.

Why, you getting scared O’Neil?

He sat like a pale imp in the darkness, his knees pressed against his chin. The bed, a chair, nothing else except a bible and the inside of his head. In the morning they let him out to collect his breakfast from the corridor, then they shut him behind the metal door again. It was the same at dinner and the same when he ate his tea and the boy didn’t see more than the yellow walls and those four meters of corridor for almost a fortnight. He pissed in the room he slept in.

On the eleventh night O’Neil picked up his chair and beat it against his window. The seat cracked on the square bars. He pounded glass. When four screws arrived he gripped the chair leg high behind his back imagining it was a Samari sword and he still had it in his hands when they slammed him to the floor to strip him. They dragged the boy, naked and raging, into a pad where the furniture was made from moulded plastic and bolted into the walls.

Give me my fucking clothes back, he said.

He beat the door with his fists, hammered through the night till his hands swelled and stopped looking human. Redness daubed the white walls and the white skin on his small body so that he seemed like some bawling baby smeared in pussy juices. Finally it was his mother he cried out loud for and the screws watched through the door slot at him hiding under a blanket and knew that it was over.

In the morning they let him wash and gave him his clothes.

You finished blubbing yet O’Neil?

The boy didn’t answer.

A duty nurse from Healthcare bound up his hands.

Then they put him back on the wing.

During her time as the Writer-In-Residence at St. Albans School, Caitlin was interviewed by Tom Dews for the Ellison Library Podcast Series. To hear the interview and listen to Caitlin read some poems, click here:

http://vimeo.com/16853518

Caitlin was a featured reader for the Apostrophe Cast Reading Series. To listen to Caitlin read several poems, click here:

http://apostrophecast.com/labels/poetry.html

Some of Caitlin’s work available online:

Click here to read Caitlin’s “Backward Sonnet for a Forward Thinker,” which was originally published in Rattle:

http://rattle.com/blog/2010/06/backward-sonnet-thinker-caitlin-doyle/

Click here to check out an interview with Caitlin and read her poem “If Siegfried And Roy Had Never Met,” which was originally published in Black Warrior Review

http://www.apostrophecast.com/blog/?p=303

Click here to read three of Caitlin’s poems in Unsplendid:

“Thirteen,” which appeared in Unsplendid and then was chosen for publication in Best New Poets 2009 http://www.unsplendid.com/2-3/2-3_doyle_thirteen_frames.htm

“Carnvial” http://www.unsplendid.com/2-3/2-3_doyle_carnival_frames.htm

“Fragment 31” (a translation of a Sappho poem) http://www.unsplendid.com/2-2/2-2_sappho_fragment31_frames.htm

Click here to read Caitlin’s “The Breakfast In Heidelberg Series,” which was originally published in the Boston Review:
http://bostonreview.net/BR35.6/doyle.php

the garden was rented: in other words, it did not know how to mourn & would change instead. the trees yes the trees would go on breathing, the poison oak would choke the telephone poles, immense white roses festooning the airstream in slaphappy wreathes, the sun slowly unwrapping the white of the verandah wicker, like bandages.

everything: flimsy lids & thin folds/ everything: gone amorously to seed: good soil, sprout here. in the mesh & vagrant shade of sunfat firs, sweet death of leafmold & mackintosh & the last stubborn floorboards ript, uninhibited from temporality & man’s passion for nomenclature.

just listen: I was there, I remember birdsong & the sun breaking, many-fingered in the firs. god speaking to adam in a language such as lovers use: a duet in which there is no dominant gesture, only permutation & extension, the words shuffling helterskelter, inarticulate, a broken wing.

already adam was looking at a cow & thinking meat. turning the trees over in his mind, whose swift & terrible magic was in making matter matter as in so many ticonderoga per calocedrus. whose whole life had been surrounded by angels & endlessly dreaming, beautiful uncut grasses.

that’s right adam signed on the dotted line signed in a single stroke, aching with the loneliness of I. the world turned insideout emptied & we are left holding only the crumpled receipt. you see how easy it is, how necessary that I would have to get up on one elbow turn away from him yes, absorbing the terrible symmetry of the fruit trees

blank bride of the hour

she is twenty-five. sawing the plastic bracelet with a grapefruit knife. has the child enough teeth for an apple she wonders. adrift in the spectacular liquor, she refuses to be familiar with the choral warbling, pupils like blue flowers in milk, in its spilled blaze the stag—

she remembers how she sinned… it was so simple! the light begins its slow foggy wash over God’s visible kingdom: immense banyan tree, swimming pools & backyard citrus, in the second-hand sunlight low fragile houses advertising yard eggs crickets turpentine. where in the heavy delirium of beginning nothing moves but the coin of a bird

she is a guest. she is smashing icecubes with a wooden spoon. sewing sequins on the child’s witty improbable parrotgreen jeans, ecstatically ironing. of course when the baby was born there was no where to put it—

she has no memories. though she remembers the wedding clearly. it had taken place in a lush tropical forest with dinosaurs. the sun was bubbling at the end of the world. they had drunk a lot together & then fallen asleep, lovingly entwined in the brilliant epiphytes

she is waiting. Thanksgiving begins, with a terrific roar of shotguns. she is wearing a thin tshirt hibiscus shorts & sunglasses the colour of champagne bottles. her wrists are wrapped in calamine & Saran. there are clingpeaches & cigarettes & fireworks & ham, fisheggs in a sand bucket & tiny dead songbirds, clustered like grapes—

already she cannot remember him. putting on a facemask & looking at the baffled guileless heart of the sea, this necessary fiction—. the proof of the memory is scratched out by the charred antlers of your eyes. she will tell the child this, at any rate

she does not have to make anything of these moments. a man & a woman & a child scrambling from a torched trailer. fire licking the ground like a tomcat lapping at scraps. a thin lemon lake of brightness rises from the crimson ground—

she is a stranger here. hungry & dangerous. white nunca, red meat, a beautiful suitor. morning rises from the earth like an animal & it goes

committed to hurrying after it, alive—

we woke yesterday not in optimism but by accident, obeying our nature like the coyote or the sparrow always does. with the dream still in our eyes & the sloppy blonde light spilling across the hour & an electric waterfall onto the avocado pine secretary & a parrot singing in the gourd grown in a terra cotta mould, we were helpless the wings of our mind still flapping. we lay naked on the bed & the television [so clean & so light] arrived to us from other time zones, where we were wearing la marque roses on our lapels & shining, patriotic trumpets filled the air with ballooning birdlike song, reminding us it is morning & we are hopeful—on the brink/ brim/ cusp…

… take out your pen. begin. we. today, as yesterday, the hand-carved coyotes in the motel lobby are mutely howling, there are brave caring men with beautiful muskets & custom lawn irrigation systems making this great continent safe for wild boars, sugarcane & Mrs. Thompson’s Golden Free Peach, there are, for a modest sum, shrimps available on Midwestern menus, there are also Canadians who lease forty-six pristine lakes as real-world test tubes. seen from space with no detail of buildings the world is a stallion rolling in a pasture of blue ether & we are politics human hands. walking forward now in the shimmery, spectacular never-ending daylite of our twenty-first century world—

Businesses and schools closed that first day; there was no way to handle the ash, no plows on hand in that tropical city. It was a nuisance, we were told, but not really dangerous; children poured outside to play wearing bathing suits and surgical masks. Housewives vacuumed the street. Dust got into the air raid siren and it blared over the city for the first time since World War II. Our family was freed from obligation?Lou from teaching at the university, Alex from a day of second grade, and me from filling time. We steered our bicycles through the fine dust and joined other families making ash angels in the park; we communicated through exclamations and gestures and in that bizarre world I felt, for the first time in three months, part of something.

I got arrested on the way home from the park. A policeman flagged us down and checked the registration numbers on our bicycles; the name on mine did not match the name on my alien registration card and I was put in the backseat of a police car while my husband and child stared. He told my son, whose brain had soaked up Japanese without even trying, not to worry, that I would be calling them soon, to go and play and enjoy his day off of school. Lou kept pointing to the bike and repeating the name of the university. His voice shook and rose. In shock, I watched them get smaller from the backseat, half expecting my husband to chase us on his bicycle.

The police station was dark; the power must have gone out. A man with eyes too big for his face sat next to me at a card table. Five older men looked on, smoking and chatting. Occasionally they laughed. The man opened a laptop computer, then typed something and angled the screen toward me. A window popped up:

Why do you steal a bicycle?

Ah, the misunderstandings never ended. My fingers flew as I explained.

He read the translation carefully, as if inspecting a scroll. He shook his head and typed. The record of bicycle is not found. University worker has no availability today for the confirmation.

I argued my point. Suddenly one of the older men flicked his cigarette butt to the ground, bent down and shouted, ?Why you steal??

A bored-looking woman arrived in uniform, her black hair still wet from washing. She sat on the other side of me.

When can I go home? I typed.

That is difficult.

Why is it difficult?

Yes, I see. You see, it is not believing you tell the truth. He said something to the woman. They both stood up; she took my wrist. I jerked it away. I yelled, ?I didn?t steal the goddamn bike!? They looked embarrassed, as if I were a senile grandmother they must humor.

Handcuffs. Photographs. Fingerprints. Somewhere I gave up speaking; no one could understand me. The jail was half an hour away by car, and before I went outside, the woman fastened a leather belt around my waist. A rope hung from it like a leash. She gripped it in her fist and avoided my eyes.

Credit: Gettysburg Review, Winter 2007