Innocence: A Memoir
All souls grow roughly, out of careless errors.
This month brings two things: the moon and you, both at my breasts.
I’ve always had the capacity for joy in quietness,
joy on a train journey,
joy in the secret smell of moss on stone,
joy with every cent I’ve earned,
joy at the café table,
joy with kittens,
joy with a pompom on top,
joy playing mini-golf.
My joy gets progressively cheesier.
And joy said:
hi how are you
hi how are u
your picture is so nice
hi how are you
hi
hi how are you
dear
hi
how are
you
hi how are you
And joy is the smiling driver who said:
“Who decided there is nothing to opening a drawer or crossing the street? There’s a bible in most things, in many places and occurrences, you just can’t bear to realize it. Get in, I’ll take you anywhere.”
It has been a sick winter,
the windows eating noise, desolation, and work.
The ceiling freezes my next idea.
Up there, my next idea is giggling viciously.
It wouldn’t if it had seen me fall.
My religion is catholic and stormy,
surely an abomination.
My politics are catholic and stormy.
My practice catholic and stormy.
You want a sinner? You don’t want me.
The joke is that I haven’t fallen.
But I’ve fought with every moon this month,
one after another those watery ideas I grow
unprogressively toward and away from.
***
Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Do-Over; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. She teaches at The New School in New York, and she is the co-editor of the poetry review website SCOUT.
