Carolyn Forché

In Spanish he whispers there is no time left. It is the sound of scythes arcing in wheat, the ache of some field song in Salvador. The wind along the prison, cautious as Francisco’s hands on the inside, touching the walls as he walks, it is his wife’s breath slipping into his cell each night while he imagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country. There is nothing one man will not do to another. 1979

Au silence de celle qui laisse rêveur . —René Char By boat to Seurasaari where the small fish were called vendace. A man blew a horn of birchwood toward the nightless sea. Still voice. Fire that is no fire. Ahead years unknown to be lived— Bells from the tower in the all-at-once, then one by one, hours. Outside (so fleetingly) ourselves— In a still mirror, in a blue within where this earthly journey dreaming itself begins, thought into being from the hidden to the end of the visible. Mountains before and behind, heather and lichen, yarrow, gorse, then a sea village of chartreuse fronds. Spent fuel, burnt wind, mute swans. We drove the birch-lined highway from Dresden to Berlin behind armored cars in late afternoon, nineteenth of June, passing the black cloud of a freight truck from Budapest. Through disappearing villages, past horses grazing vanished fields. The year before you died, America went to war again on the other side of the world. This is how the earth becomes, you said, a grotto of skeletons. In the ruins of a station: a soaked bed, broken chairs, a dead coal stove. White weather, chalk and basalt, puffins, fuchsia and history shot through with particles of recognition: this one wetted down with petrol then set alight, that one taking forty rounds, this other found eleven years later in a bog. In the station house, imaginary maps, smoke chased by wind, a registry of arrivals, the logs of ghost ships and a few prison diaries written on tissue paper. Do you remember the blue-leaved lilies? The grotto, the hoarfrost, the frieze? Through the casements of glass hand-blown before the war, a birch tree lets snow drop through its limbs onto other birches. Birch twigs in wind through glass. Who were we then? Such a laughter as morning peeled its light from us! You said the cemeteries were full in a voice like wind plaiting willows—fields in bloom but silent without grasshoppers or bees. What do you want then? You with your neverness, your unknown, your book of things, you with once years ahead to be lived. Your father believes he took you with him, that you are in an urn beside your sleeping mother but I am still writing with your hand, as you stand in your still-there of lighted words. Such is the piano’s sadness and the rifle’s moonlight. Stairwells remember as do doors, but windows do not— do not, upon waking, gaze out a window if you wish to remember your dream An ache of hope that you will come back— the cawing flock is not your coming. Did you float toward Salzburg? A wind in the mustard fields?—or walk instead beside me through the asylum in Krakow? Hours after your death you seemed everywhere at once like the swifts at twilight. Now your moments are clouds in a photograph of swifts. In the hour held open between day and night under the meteor showers of Perseid we held each other for the last time. Dead, you whispered where is the road? There, through the last of the sentences, just there— through the last of the sentences, the road—

I take off my shirt, I show you. I shaved the hair out under my arms. I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair on my legs with a knife, getting white. My hair is the color of chopped maples. My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south. (Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills) Skin polished as a Ming bowl showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet. In the night I come to you and it seems a shame to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man. You recognize strangers, think you lived through destruction. You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory. You want to know what I know? Your own hands are lying.

Swallows carve lake wind, trailers lined up, fish tins. The fires of a thousand small camps spilled on a hillside. I pull leeks, morels from the soil, fry chubs from the lake in moonlight. I hear someone, hear the splash, groan of a waterpump, wipe my mouth. Fish grease spits at darkness. Once I nudged a canoe through that water, letting its paddle lift, drip. I was sucked down smaller than the sound of the dropping, looked out from where I had vanished.

We rise from the snow where we’ve lain on our backs and flown like children, from the imprint of perfect wings and cold gowns, and we stagger together wine-breathed into town where our people are building their armies again, short years after body bags, after burnings. There is a man I’ve come to love after thirty, and we have our rituals of coffee, of airports, regret. After love we smoke and sleep with magazines, two shot glasses and the black and white collapse of hours. In what time do we live that it is too late to have children? In what place that we consider the various ways to leave? There is no list long enough for a selective service card shriveling under a match, the prison that comes of it, a flag in the wind eaten from its pole and boys sent back in trash bags. We’ll tell you. You were at that time learning fractions. We’ll tell you about fractions. Half of us are dead or quiet or lost. Let them speak for themselves. We lie down in the fields and leave behind the corpses of angels.

Just as he changes himself, in the end eternity changes him. —Mallarmé On the phonograph, the voice of a woman already dead for three decades, singing of a man who could make her do anything. On the table, two fragile glasses of black wine, a bottle wrapped in its towel. It is that room, the one we took in every city, it is as I remember: the bed, a block of moonlight and pillows. My fingernails, pecks of light on your thighs. The stink of the fire escape. The wet butts of cigarettes you crushed one after another. How I watched the morning come as you slept, more my son than a man ten years older. How my breasts feel, years later, the tongues swishing in my dress, some yours, some left by other men. Since then, I have always wakened first, I have learned to leave a bed without being seen and have stood at the washbasins, wiping oil and salt from my skin, staring at the cupped water in my two hands. I have kept everything you whispered to me then. I can remember it now as I see you again, how much tenderness we could wedge between a stairwell and a police lock, or as it was, as it still is, in the voice of a woman singing of a man who could make her do anything.

A peacock on an olive branch looks beyond the grove to the road, beyond the road to the sea, blank-lit, where a sailboat anchors to a cove. As it is morning, below deck a man is pouring water into a cup, listening to the radio-talk of the ships: barges dead in the calms awaiting port call, pleasure boats whose lights hours ago went out, fishermen setting their nets for mullet, as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines, whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces clear of night, putting the music out with morning light, and for the breath of an hour it is possible to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember that there was no word for blue among the ancients, but there was the whirring sound before the oars of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world, through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens, troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought — then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts, the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there: not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme, a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain, then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears in the writings of Herodotus: I love and do not love, I am mad and I am not mad. Like you he thought himself not better, nor worse than anyone else.

We spend our morning in the flower stalls counting the dark tongues of bells that hang from ropes waiting for the silence of an hour. We find a table, ask for paella, cold soup and wine, where a calm light trembles years behind us. In Buenos Aires only three years ago, it was the last time his hand slipped into her dress, with pearls cooling her throat and bells like these, chipping at the night— As she talks, the hollow clopping of a horse, the sound of bones touched together. The paella comes, a bed of rice and camarones, fingers and shells, the lips of those whose lips have been removed, mussels the soft blue of a leg socket. This is not paella, this is what has become of those who remained in Buenos Aires. This is the ring of a rifle report on the stones, her hand over her mouth, her husband falling against her. These are the flowers we bought this morning, the dahlias tossed on his grave and bells waiting with their tongues cut out for this particular silence.

The bleached wood massed in bone piles, we pulled it from dark beach and built fire in a fenced clearing. The posts’ blunt stubs sank down, they circled and were roofed by milled lumber dragged at one time to the coast. We slept there. Each morning the minus tide— weeds flowed it like hair swimming. The starfish gripped rock, pastel, rough. Fish bones lay in sun. Each noon the milk fog sank from cloud cover, came in our clothes and held them tighter on us. Sea stacks stood and disappeared. They came back when the sun scrubbed out the inlet. We went down to piles to get mussels, I made my shirt a bowl of mussel stones, carted them to our grate where they smoked apart. I pulled the mussel lip bodies out, chewed their squeak. We went up the path for fresh water, berries. Hardly speaking, thinking. During low tide we crossed to the island, climbed its wet summit. The redfoots and pelicans dropped for fish. Oclets so silent fell toward water with linked feet. Jacynthe said little. Long since we had spoken Nova Scotia, Michigan, and knew beauty in saying nothing. She told me about her mother who would come at them with bread knives then stop herself, her face emptied. I told her about me, never lied. At night at times the moon floated. We sat with arms tight watching flames spit, snap. On stone and sand picking up wood shaped like a body, like a gull. I ran barefoot not only on beach but harsh gravels up through the woods. I shit easy, covered my dropping. Some nights, no fires, we watched sea pucker and get stabbed by the beacon circling on Tatoosh. 2 I stripped and spread on the sea lip, stretched to the slap of the foam and the vast red dulce. Jacynthe gripped the earth in her fists, opened— the boil of the tide shuffled into her. The beach revolved, headlands behind us put their pines in the sun. Gulls turned a strong sky. Their pained wings held, they bit water quick, lifted. Their looping eyes continually measure the distance from us, bare women who do not touch. Rocks drowsed, holes filled with suds from a distance. A deep laugh bounced in my flesh and sprayed her. 3 Flies crawled us, Jacynthe crawled. With her palms she spread my calves, she moved my heels from each other. A woman’s mouth is not different, sand moved wild beneath me, her long hair wiped my legs, with women there is sucking, the water slops our bodies. We come clean, our clits beat like twins to the loons rising up. We are awake. Snails sprinkle our gulps. Fish die in our grips, there is sand in the anus of dancing. Tatoosh Island hardens in the distance. We see its empty stones sticking out of the sea again. Jacynthe holds tinder under fire to cook the night’s wood. If we had men I would make milk in me simply.

Sleep to sleep through thirty years of night, a child herself with child, for whom we searched through here, or there, amidst bones still sleeved and trousered, a spine picked clean, a paint can, a skull with hair Sewn into the hem of memory: Fire. God of Abraham,God of Isaac,God of Jacob, God not of philosophers or scholars. God not of poets. Night to night: child walking toward me through burning maize over the clean bones of those whose flesh was lifted by zopilotes into heaven. So that is how we ascend! In the clawed feet of fallen angels. To be assembled again in the work rooms of clouds. She rose from where they found her lying not far from a water urn, leaving herself behind on the ground where they found her, holding her arms before her as if she were asleep. That is how she appears to me: a ghost in heaven. Carrying her arms in her arms. Blue smoke from corn cribs, flap of wings. On the walls of the city streets a plague of initials. Walking through a fire-lit river to a burning house: dead Singer sewing machine and piece of dress. Outside a cashew tree wept blackened cashews over lamina. Outside paper fireflies rose to the stars. Bring penicillin if you can, surgical tape, a whetstone, mosquito repellent but not the aerosol kind. Especially bring a syringe for sucking phlegm, a knife, wooden sticks, a surgical clamp, and plastic bags. You will need a bottle of cloud for anesthesia. Like the flight of a crane through colorless dreams. When a leech opens your flesh it leaves a small volcano. Always pour turpentine over your hair before going to sleep. Such experiences as these are forgotten before memory intrudes. The girl was found (don’t say this) with a man’s severed head stuffed into her where a child would have been. No one knew who the man was. Another of the dead. So they had not, after all, killed a pregnant girl. This was a relief to them. That sound in the brush? A settling of wind in sorghum. If they capture you, talk. Talk. Please yes. You heard me right the first time. You will be asked who you are. Eventually, we are all asked who we are. All who come All who come into the world All who come into the world are sent. Open your curtain of spirit.