The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

Ode

 ode And now the silver, ripping sound of white on white, the satin, light snow torn under wheels, car bang metally grenading, and the wood poles, whipping, loom—  I have always wanted to sing a song of praise for the unscathed: myself stepping from the fractured car whose black axle’s one inch from gone; slim pole slicing cable up to sheet metal, seat foam, corduroy (like butter, the mechanic will later tell me, poking a stiff finger through the cloth), to pierce the exact point I was supposed to sit, stopping because praise begins where pain transfigures itself, stoppered by a deeper kind of joy: so I transfigure myself from driver to survivor, the blessed Lazarine failure bolting up and opening her eyes. And here are the thousand wrecks from a life configured in snow before me: myself, at five, pulled from the burning car seat; at twelve, bleeding from the scalp after the car throws me from my bike; at fourteen, tumbling over the slick hood rushing; 0 sockets of windows with glass bashed out into a translucent, toothy ring; lights and bumpers clipped clean off; tires burst; deer gravitationally hurled through my windshield; brakes given out and worse, the icy loop de loops on roads, the trucker’s 8 fat wheels squealing— All the ways technology should have killed me and didn’t. Praise for my death-hungry luck! And all the manner in which I’ve failed it— marriage lost, buried in the blanks of white space, my solitude at the Greyhound station knowing no one to retrieve me, carless among the others pressed tight to their own disaster or boredom— unbearably young mothers, drifters, boy soldiers shoulder to shoulder with the insane, weaving the same thread of conversation back and forth between ourselves. How could this happen to me at this age, at this stage, how did I not notice, and will you put this seat up? and will you lend me this quarter? and will you call me a cab when we get back home? The young man in the seat before me, head full of zigzagging tight braids says,  Sure you can dig up that ballot box in Florida and while you’re at it look up all the bones buried in the Everglades, repeats it for the amusement of the woman across from him, who knows a presidential failure like she knows herself, and when we pass my accident on the road points and whistles, snickers: Bet you no one walked away from that one. For this, and for all these things: praise to the white plains of Wyoming, highway coiled like a length of rime-colored rope; to snow broiling in the sunlight so that the landscape takes on a nuclear glow, so bright we have to shield our eyes from it. Praise for myself playing at morbidity because I thought I had a right to it as if flesh had to follow spirit to such a pure depth the bones themselves could not rest but must be broken, nerves singed then ripped out, the heart clenched madly in its chest. As if I had nothing except this white earth, this smashed car to praise what I knew before and know even better now, the hills cold as a hip bone and tufted with ice. Praise to my youth and to my age, praise to ambition and small-mindedness, the kind I recognize and the kind I am soon to recognize; praise  to self-hatred for it keeps me alive, and praise for the splinters of delight that can pierce it. Praise for wood pole, praise for glass. Praise for muscle, praise for bone. The sky is bright as a bowl on a nurse’s table today. And the sun gleams into it as our bus slides by, the light of us a wash of gold illuminating bodies lost, bodies regained; gleaming like my heart here, on this earth, bloody and still beating.   ...