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.

Angels, where were you?

ADDRESS TO THE ANGELS

                     by Maxine Kumin

Taking off at sunset over the city

it seems we pull the sun up

and pin it over the rim

or is it the other way round,

is it the horizon we push down

like a loose cuticle?

I am up here grieving, tallying

my losses, and I think how once,

the world was flat and rested on

the back of a giant fish whose tail

was in his mouth and on the Day

of Judgment all the sinners fell

overboard into the black gulf.

Once we walked distances

or went by horse and knew our places

on the planet, gravity-wise.

Now angels, God's secret agents,

I am assured by Billy Graham, circulate among us to tell

the living they are not alone.

On twenty-four-hour duty, angels

flutter around my house and barn

blundering into the cobwebs,

letting pots boil over

or watching the cat torture

a chipmunk When my pony,

filching apples, rears and catches

his halter on a branch and hangs

himself all afternoon, I like

to think six equine angels fan 

the strangling beast

until his agony is past.

Who knows how much or little

anyone suffers? Animals

are honest through their inability

to lie. Man, in his last hour,

has a compulsion to come clean.

Death is the sacred criterion.

Always it is passion that

confuses the issue. Always

I think that no one

can be sadder than I am.

For example, now, watching

this after-sunset

in the sky on top of Boston

I am wanting part of my life back

so I can do it over.

So I can do it better.

Angels, where were you when

by best friend did herself in?

Were you lunching beside us

that final noon, did you catch

some nuance that went past my ear?"

Did you ease my father out

of his cardiac arrest that wet

fall day I sat at the high crib bed

holding his hand? And when

my black-eyed susan-child ran

off with her European lover

and has been ever since an unbelonger,

were you whirligiging over

the suitcases? Did you put

your imprimature on

that death-by-separation?

It's no consolation, angels,

knowing you're around

helplessly observing like

some sacred CIA. Even

if you're up here, flattened

against the Fasten Your Seatbelt sign

or hugging the bowl in the lavatory,

we are, each one of us, our own

prisoner. We are

locked up in our own story.

From Maxine Kumin, Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief: New and Selected Poems (1982).

Generous ghosts must walk that house at night

A Mild-Spoken Citizan Finally Writes to the

White House

                    by William Meredith

Please read this letter when you are alone.

Don't be afraid to listen to what may change you.

I am urging on you only what I myself have done.

Int he first place, I respect the office, although one night

last spring, when you had committed (in my eyes)

criminal folly, and there was a toast to you, I wouldn't rise.

A man's mistakes (if I may lecture you), his worst acts,

aren't out of character, as he'd like to think,

are not put on him by power or stress or too much to drink,

but are simply a worse self he consents to be. Thus

there is no mistaking you. I marvel that there's

so much disrespect for a man just being himself, being his errors.

'I never met a worse man than myself'

Thoreau said. When we're our best selves, we can all

afford to say that. Self-respect is vest when marginal.

And when the office of the presidency will again

accommodate that remark, it may be held by better men

than you or me. Meantime I hear there is music in your house,

your women wear queens' wear, though winds howl outside,

and I say, that's all right, the man should have some ease,

but does anyone say to your face who you really are"

No, they say Mr. President, while any young person

feels free to call me voter, believer, even causer.

And if I were also a pray-er, a man given to praying,

(I'm often in fact careless about great things, like you)

and I wanted to pray for your office, as in fact I do,

the words that would come to me would more likely be

god change you than god bless the presidency.

I would pray, God cause the President to change.

As I myself have been changed, first my head, then my heart,

so that I no longer pretend that I don't swindle or kill

when there is swindling and killing on my nation's part.

Well. Go out into your upstairs hall tonight with this letter.

Generous ghosts must walk that house at night,

carrying draughts of the Republic like cold water

to a man parched after too much talk and wine and smoke.

Hear them. They are elected ghosts, though some wil be radicals

and all may want to tell you things you will not like.

It will seem dark in the carpeted hall, despite the nightlights

in the dull sconces. Make the guard let you pass.

'If you are the President,' a shade with a water glass

will ask you (and this is all I ask), calling you by name,

himself perhaps a famous name, 'If you are the President

and things in the land have come to all this shame,

why don't you try doing something new? This building rose

laborious as a dream, to house one character:

man trusting man anew. That's who each tenant is

-- or an imposter, as some of us have been.'

1969

Bruise

                   by Michael Ondaatje

In the medieval darkness of the Holland Tunnel

with luminous green paint, on whitewashed walls

of the Madrid zoo, in his think-fingered handwriting

onto dust at the dry Casablanca aquarium

                                   "When last I held you in my arms,

                                    my love, the West African Black

                                    Rhinoceros was still magnificent

                                    and still alive . . ."

What have you been doing to Paul Vermeersch?
He searched for you encyclpedically

in Albacete, in Zagora, in those cities

whose names have changed,

till the maps he relies on wear out.

In what disguise did you leave him?
So he will not recognize

your gait anymore,

or your stare out from a diorama.

Hunt and Torment. Call but no Response.

In the end words of love reveal

just yourself. Not why

or the wished-for thing. Only the Spanish

consider his plea, only the drivers

deep in a tunnel into New York

nod wisely, agree with him.

But it is the black rhino whose loss they mourn,

not the person he held once in his arms.

When it is over, it is over

they say in the passing dark.

There are no longer great nostrils

to scent out the source of torment.

It is a generation since our love,

to justify anger, had a horn, a tusk.

The New Yorker, 1/13/14.

Psalm of Despair

               by Radmila Lazic

I dwell in a land of despair

In the city of despair

Among desperate people

Myself desperate

I embrace my desperate lover

With desperate hands

Whispering desperate words

Kissing him with desperate lips.

In despair we make children

In despair we strangle them

And feed our desperate offspring
With our own despair

So that they may multiply

By giving birth to ever more desperate children

And so on.

For the God of Despair is our Lord

And his envoys of despair

With their instruments of despair

That coat our homes with despair

Drape our windows with despair

And board up our doors with it

As despair rises around us like walls.

Preaching the religion of despair

For gain and wealth

Instructing us in Holy Despair

For which we are to earn life eternal

So our dead will rise again

In despair.

The wandering lamb

That found no path or shelter

No dawn and no morning

Forever and ever --

Damn you wicked hand

That wrote this in the year 2013 of our Lord.

Trans. from Serbian by Charles Simic. NYRB 12/13/2013.

The roar of a thousand orchestras

Dream

     by Wislawa Szymborska

My fallen, my turned to dust, my earth,
assumes the shape he has in the photograph:
with a leaf’s shadow on his face, with a seashell in his hand,
he sets out toward my dream.

He wanders through darknesses extinguished since never,
through emptinesses opened to themselves forever,
through seven times seven times seven silences.

He appears on the other side of my eyelids,
in the one and only world that he can reach.
His shot heart beats.
A first wind stirs from his hair.

A meadow spreads between us.
Skies come flying with clouds and birds,
mountains rise silently on the horizon
and a river flows downward, searching for the sea.

You can see so far, so far,
that day and night turn simultaneous,
and all seasons of the year occur at once.
A four-quartered moon unfolds its fan,
snowflakes swarm beside butterflies,
fruit falls from the blossoming tree.

We draw closer. In tears,
in smiles, I don’t know. Just one step more
and we’ll listen to your shell together,
to the roar of a thousand orchestras,
to the roar of our wedding march.

Translated by Clare Cavanaugh.  NYRB, January 9, 2014.

Train Dreams

from Train Dreams

                    by Denis Johnson

. . . . . .

Her whimpering ceased as he got closer, approaching cautiously so as not to terrify either this creature or himself. The wolf-girl waited, shot full of animal dread and perfectly still, moving nothing but her eyes, following his every move but not meeting his gaze, the breath smoking before her nostrils.

The child's eyes sparked greenly in the lamplight like those of any wolf. Her face was that of a wolf, but hairless.

"Kate?" he said. "Is it you?" But it was.

Nothing about her told him that. He simply knew it. This was his daughter.

She stayed stock-still as he drew even closer. He hoped that some sign of recognition might show itself and prove her to be Kate. But her eyes only watched in flat terror, like a wolf's. Still. Still and all. Kate she was, but Kate no longer. Kate-no-longer lay on her side, her left leg akimbo, splintered and bloody bone jutting below the knee; just a child spent from crawling on threes and having dragged the shattered leg behind her. He'd wondered sometimes about little Kate's hair, how it might have looked if she'd lived; but she'd snatched herself nearly bald.  It grew out in a few patches.

He came within arm's reach.  Kate-no-longer growled, barked, snapped as her father bent down toward her, and then her eyes glassed and she so faded from herself he believed she'd expired at his approach.  But she lived, and watched him.

"Kate, Kate.  What's happened to you?"

He set down the lamp and club and got his arms beneath her and lifted.  Her breathing came rapid, faint, and shallow.  She whimpered once in his ear and snapped her jaws, but didn't otherwise struggle.  He turned with her in his embrace and made for the cabin, now walking away from the lamplight and thus toward his own monstrous shadow as it engulfed his home and shrank magically at his approach.  Inside he laid her on his pallet on the floor.  "I'll get the lamp," he told her.

When he came back into the cabin, she was still there.  He set the lamp on the table where he could see what he was doing, and prepared to splint the broken leg with kindling, cutting the top of his long johns off himself around the waist, dragging it over his head, tearing it into strips.  As soon as he grasped the child's ankle with one hand and put his other on the thigh to pull, she gave a terrible sigh and then her breathing slowed.  She's fainted.  He straightened the leg as best he could, and feeling that he could take his time now, he whittled a stick of kindling so that it cupped the shin.  He pulled a bench beside the pallet and sat himself, resting her foot across his knee while he applied the splint and bound it around.  "I'm not a doctor,: he told her.  "I'm just the one that's here."  He opened the window across the room to give her air.

She lay there asleep with the life driven half out of her.  He watched her a long time.  She was as leathery as an old man.  Her hands were curled under, the back of her wrists calloused stumps, her feet misshapen, as hard and knotted as wooden burls.  What was it about her face that seemed so wolflike, so animal, even as she slept?  He could say. The face just seemed to have no life behind it when the eyes were closed.  As if the creature would have no thoughts other than what it saw.

He moved the bench against the wall, sat back, and dozed.  A train going through the valley didn't wake him but only entered his dream.  Later, near daylight, a much smaller sound brought him around.  The wolf girl had stirred.  She was leaving.

She leaped out the window.