The Time Machine by Laura Kasischke

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend January 5, 2017   The Time Machine   Laura Kasischke

My mother begged me: Please, please, study stenography...   Without it I would have no future, and this   is the future that was lost in time to me   having scoffed at her, refusing to learn the only skill I'd ever need, the one   I will associate forever now with loss, with her bald head, her wig, a world already gone by the time we had this argument, while   our walls stayed slathered in its pale green.  While we wore its sweater sets. While we giddily picked the pineapple off our hams with toothpicks. Now   I'm lost somewhere between 1937 and 1973. My   time machine, blown off course, just as my mother knew it would be.   Oh, Mama: forget about me. You don't have to forgive me, but know this, please:   I am the Stenographer now. I am the Secretary you wanted me to be.  I am   the girl who gained the expertise you knew some day some man would need.    Too late, maybe.  (Evening.)  I'm sick, I think. You're dead.  I'm weak.   "And now I'm going to tell you a little secret.  Get your pen and steno-pad, and sit down across from me."   Ready?   The grieving:   It never ends.    You learn a million tricks, memorize the symbols & practice the techniques   and still you wake up every morning lost inside your lost machine. Confused, but always on a journey.   Disordered.   Cut short.   Still moving.   Keep speaking Mama. Please. I'm taking it down so quickly, so   quickly, even   (perhaps especially)   when I appear   not to be.    I do this naturally.   See? So   naturally that in the end no training was ever needed.   None at all. None at all.   I taught myself so well.   It's all I can do now.            Copyright © 2017 Laura Kasischke. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "As I moved from childhood to adolescence, my mother became more and more worried about how I'd support myself after high school, what I could possibly do in the world to survive. She begged me to study secretarial skills I didn't want to have—although I did win the Best Typist in Class Award in eighth grade. I refused to take the class about which I write in this poem. It's not an exaggeration, exactly, to say that my mother thought this greatly diminished my chances of success in life. We'd looked up, together, the requirements for being a stewardess (later to be called 'flight attendant,' of course), but 'straight teeth' was another thing I didn't have. My mother hoped I might consider being a travel agent. We had no way of knowing, of course, how much the world was about to change, how technology would make any stenography skills I would have acquired, had I been a better daughter, more or less obsolete, and how the Internet would have put me out of work as a travel agent just when I'd reached an age that would have made it difficult for me to retrain for something else. She never witnessed any of these changes, but I have. She never knew me as anyone with a career beyond Worst Babysitter in the Neighborhood. Here, I start up this old argument again. I believe it was triggered in my mind by a wall I glimpsed, painted that pastel green I associate with the decade before the one in which I was born—a color my mother must have associated with many of her own life's successes and failures, and her hopes and fears for mine, with which she died." —Laura Kasischke   Laura Kasischke is the author of Where Now: New and Selected Poems, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2017. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.       Poetry by Kasischke   Where Now: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) "Mozart Songbook" by Joan Larkin "Dawn" by James Laughlin "Chorus" by Catherine Barnett Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

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