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.
