Tess Gallagher

If I could begin anything I’d say stop asking forgiveness, especially theirs which was always the fault mentioned in your condition. Nettles could be feathers the moment they brush your ankle. At the same time: floods, earthquakes, the various slaveries hunchbacked near the fence to catch your glance. What is it to say that among the hired boats we carried our bodies well, cracked jokes, left the gaps in our lives and not the page? This far to learn the boat does not touch the water! And if this is goodbye, it is a light nowhere near believing and I am happy and it is all right to make a distance of a nearness, to say, ‘Boat, I have left you behind. Boat, I am with you.’

When I get up he has been long at work, his brush limber against the house. Seeing him on his ladder under the eaves, I look back on myself asleep in the dream I could not carry awake. Sleep inside a house that is being painted, whole lifetimes now only the familiar cast of morning light over the prayer plant. This “not remembering” is something new of where you have been. What was settled or unsettled in sleep stays there. But your house under this steady arm is leaving itself and you see this gradual surface of new light covering your sleep has the greater power. You think now you felt brush strokes or the space between them, a motion bearing down on you—accumulation of stars, each night of them arranging over the roofs of entire cities. His careful strokes whiten the web, the swirl of woodgrain blotted out like a breath stopped at the heart. Nothing has changed you say, faithlessly. But something has cleansed you past recognition. When you stand near his ladder looking up he does not acknowledge you, and as from daylight in a dream you see your house has passed from you into the blessed hands of others. This is ownership, you think, arriving in the heady afterlife of paint smell. A deep opening goes on in you. Some paint has dropped onto your shoulder as though light concealed an unsuspected weight. You think it has fallen through you. You think you have agreed to this, what has been done with your life, willingly.

The sleep of this night deepens because I have walked coatless from the house carrying the white envelope. All night it will say one name in its little tin house by the roadside. I have raised the metal flag so its shadow under the roadlamp leaves an imprint on the rain-heavy bushes. Now I will walk back thinking of the few lights still on in the town a mile away. In the yellowed light of a kitchen the millworker has finished his coffee, his wife has laid out the white slices of bread on the counter. Now while the bed they have left is still warm, I will think of you, you who are so far away you have caused me to look up at the stars. Tonight they have not moved from childhood, those games played after dark. Again I walk into the wet grass toward the starry voices. Again, I am the found one, intimate, returned by all I touch on the way.

Heartbeat trembling your kingdom of leaves near the ceremony of water, I never insisted on you. I admit I delayed. I was the Empress of Delay. But it can’t be put off now. On the sacred branch of my only voice – I insist. Insist for us all, which is the job of the voice, and especially of the poet. Else what am I for, what use am I if I don’t insist? There are messages to send. Gatherings and songs. Because we need to insist. Else what are we for? What use are we?

That linkage of warnings sent a tremor through June as if to prepare October in the hardest apples. One week in late July we held hands through the bars of his hospital bed. Our sleep made a canopy over us and it seemed I heard its durable roaring in the companion sleep of what must have been our Bedouin god, and now when the poppy lets go I know it is to lay bare his thickly seeded black coach at the pinnacle of dying. My shaggy ponies heard the shallow snapping of silk but grazed on down the hillside, their prayer flags tearing at the void—what we stared into, its cool flux of blue and white. How just shaking at flies they sprinkled the air with the soft unconscious praise of bells braided into their manes. My life simplified to “for him” and his thinned like an injection wearing off so the real gave way to the more-than-real, each moment’s carmine abundance, furl of reddest petals lifted from the stalk and no hint of the black hussar’s hat at the center. By then his breathing stopped so gradually I had to brush lips to know an ending. Tasting then that plush of scarlet which is the last of warmth, kissless kiss he would have given. Mine to extend a lover’s right past its radius, to give and also most needfully, my gallant hussar, to bend and take.

In the bath I look up and see the brown moth pressed like a pair of unpredictable lips against the white wall. I heat up the water, running as much hot in as I can stand. These handfuls over my shoulder—how once he pulled my head against his thigh and dipped a rivulet down my neck of coldest water from the spring we were drinking from. Beautiful mischief that stills a moment so I can never look back. Only now, brightest now, and the water never hot enough to drive that shiver out. But I remember solitude—no other presence and each thing what it was. Not this raw fluttering I make of you as you have made of me your watch-fire, your killing light.

I have had to write this down in my absence and yours. These things happen. Thinking of a voice added I imagine a sympathy outside us that protects the message from what can’t help, being said. The times you’ve kept your secret, putting on glasses or glancing into a page with interest, give again the hurt you’ve forgiven, pretending to be one of us. So the hope of love translates as a series of hidden moments where we like to think someone was fooled into it. Who was I then who filled these days with illegible warnings: the marriages broken, the land pillaged by speculators, no word for a stranger? This island where I thought the language was mine has left me lonely and innocent as you or that friend who let you copy his themes until the words became pictures of places you would never go. Forgive it then that so much of after depends on these, the words which must find you off the page.

for Mark Strand There are the few we hear of like Christ, who, with divine grace, made goodness look easy, had a following to draw near, gave up the right things and saw to it that sinners got listened to. Sharpening my failures, I remember the Jains, the gentle swoosh of their brooms on a dirt path trodden by children and goats, each thoughtful step taken in peril of an ant’s life or a fat grub hidden under a stick. In the car-wash, thinking of yogis under a tree plucking hair by hair the head of an initiate, I feel at least elsewhere those able for holiness— its signs and rigors—are at work. Ignominiously, I am here, brushes clamped, soap and water pulsing against my car. (A good sign too, those asylums for old and diseased animals.) My car is clean and no one has had to lift a finger. The dead bugs have been gushed away into a soup of grit and foam—the evidence not subterranean, not streaming along the asphalt in sunlight so dazzling I attend the birth-moment of the word Hosannah! I care about the bugs and not in this life will I do enough towards my own worth in the memory of them. I appreciate the Jains, their atonements for my neglect, though I understand it makes poor farmers of them, and good we all don’t aspire to such purity so there’s somebody heartless enough to plow the spuds. Early on in admiration, I put off knowledge, and so delayed reading about the Jains—not to lose solace. But in the County Library, turning a page, I meet them as the wealthiest moneylenders in Western India. Reading on, I’m encouraged—the list of virtues exceeds vices—just four of those: anger, pride, illusion and greed. The emphasis clearly on striving. I write them down in the corner of a map of Idaho: forbearance, indulgence, straightforwardness, purity, veracity, restraint, freedom from attachment to anything, poverty and chastity. Choosing, getting into the car to get to the supermarket, hearing over engine noise the bright agonies of birds, the radio news with the child nailed into a broom-closet for twenty-four hours by parents who in straightforwardness sacrificed forbearance, I feel a longing for religion, for doctrine swift as a broom to keep the path clear. Later, alone in the kitchen with the groceries, I read the list again. Overwhelmed by the loneliness of the saints, I take up my broom and begin where I stand, with linoleum.

Belfast, Winter, 1976 When we stop where you lived, the house has thickened, the entry level to the wall with bricks, as though it could keep you out. Again the dream has fooled you into waking and we have walked out past ourselves, through the windows to be remembered in the light of closed rooms as a series of impositions across the arms of a chair, that woman’s face startled out of us so it lingers along a brick front. You are leading me back to the burned arcade where you said I stood with you in your childhood last night, your childhood which includes me now as surely as the look of that missing face between the rows of houses. We have gone so far into your past that nothing reflects us. No sun gleams from the glassless frame where a room burned, though the house stayed whole. There is your school, your church, the place you drank cider at lunch time. New rows of houses are going up. Children play quietly in a stairwell. Walking back, you tell the story of the sniper’s bullet making two clean holes in the taxi, how the driver ducked and drove on like nothing happened. No pain passed through you; it did not even stop the car or make you live more carefully. Near the check point we stop talking, you let the hands rub your clothes against your body. You seem to be there, all there. Watching, I am more apart for the sign of dismissal they will give me, thinking a woman would not conceal as I have, the perfect map of this return where I have met and lost you willingly in a dead and living place. Now when you find me next in the dream, this boundary will move with us. We will both come back.

I go to the mountain side of the house to cut saplings, and clear a view to snow on the mountain. But when I look up, saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in the uppermost branches. I don’t cut that one. I don’t cut the others either. Suddenly, in every tree, an unseen nest where a mountain would be. for Drago Štambuk