Shining even to the closed eye

                             by Tess Gallagher

FRESH STAIN

I don't know now if it was kindness -- we do

and we do. But I wanted you with me

that day in the cool raspberry vines, before

I had loved anyone, when another girl and I

saw the owner's son coming to lift away

our heaped flats of berries. His white shirt outside his jeans so

tempting. That whiteness, that quick side-glance

in our direction. So we said nothing,

but quickly gathered all the berries we could, losing

some in our mirth and trampling them

like two black ponies who only want to keep their backs

free, who only want to be shaken with

the black night-in-day murmur of hemlocks

high above. our slim waists, our buds

of breasts and red stain of raspberries cheapening

our lips. We were sudden, we were

two blurred dancers who didn't need paradise. his shirt,

his white shirt when the pelting ended, as if

we had kissed him until his own blood

opened. So we refused every plea and

were satisfied. And you didn't touch me then, just

listened to the cool silence after. Inside,

the ripe hidden berries as we took up our wicker baskets

and lost our hands past the wrists

in the trellised vines. Just girls with the arms of

their sweaters twisted across their hips

in mottled sunlight, that girl you can almost

remember now as she leans into the vine,

following with pure unanswerable desire, a boy

going into the house to change his shirt.

PARADISE

He always liked to pour his darkness into

his light. The stupor of my moonbeam there too, its

hapless funneling

in the night-thickened house.

Then my childhood friend

who's been staying awake for me, left the house

so I could be alone with the powerful raft of his body,

that entryway.

I talked to him, told him things I needed to hear myself

tell him, and he listened, I can say "peacefully,"

thought maybe it was only an effect he had, the body's surety

when it becomes one muscle. Still, I believe I heard

my own voice then, as he might have heard it, eagerly

like the nostrils of any mare blowing softly over

the damp presence he was, telling it

all is safe here, all is calm and yet to be

endured here where you are gone from.

Since his feet were still there and my hands

I rubbed his feet, because it is hard to imagine

at first that the dead don't enjoy those same things

they did when alive. And even if it was only a last thing, it

was the right last thing.

What is forever beyond speech

pulls action out of us, and if it is only childlike and

unreceived, the way a child hums to the stick

it is using to scratch houses into the dirt, it is a silky

membrane and shining even to

the closed eye.

Tess Gallagher, Nine Poems, The American Poetry Review, January/February 1992.