Click on the play button below to hear me reading Tess's poem "Un Extrano":
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LAUGHTER AND STARS
By: Tess Gallagher I didn't make present those days he didn't complain but I knew he was sick, felt sick, and a look would pass between us, a doomed look that nonetheless carried streamers of light like a comet scratching light across the tablet of the night sky. We looked into each other and like the comfort a small branch is to a bird on a long migration, we took comfort in the two-way knowing of that look. I didn't make present enough his beautiful will as he went to his room with the fireplace and heaped the fire up to match the inner burning of his body's candle, the cells igniting so fast by then it kept him awake, pacing him wall to wall in the cage of his body's lustre like a panther of the will, supple and searching its parameters. He fed the fire; he wrote poems. No, I couldn't make present the tender way he took my body in the night into his arms, holding his one radiance to me like a wet match upon which one dry spot remained and he turned just so and struck himself against me and there was a blazing up, the way the night ignites with more than lips and parted legs when two souls in their firefly selves come together asking to be buried in the no-song-left-but-this dark. Had I been able to give these things I might have described his innocent laughter with a friend and me the night before his death, laughter at the clumsiness of the body, his body, with the oxygen tank attached, making sure the tube was in his mouth. His wanting to go out onto the deck of the house to see the stars again. The wheelchair catching on the rug, the oxygen tank trying to jolt loose, but somehow everything jangling along out the sliding glass doors, and the sky huge with a madman's moon, huge as a man's heart on its last breath-beat so we had to shield ourselves and turn away to find the stars. Such a plaintive, farewell hissing they made, like diamonds imbedded in the blue-black breast of forever. But then it was the night before my love's last morning, and we were together, one body to another, laughter and stars, laughter and stars. Then he got up, stood up with everything still attached and we helped him hack open a bright crevasse in the night, to hurl his heart-beat like the red living fist it was one more time out across the sleeping thresholds of the living. |
UNDER STARS
By: Tess Gallagher 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. CHERRY BLOSSOMS
By: Tess Gallagher Chekov wanting to write about "the wave of child suicides sweeping across Russia" - plunged by that sentence into sudden pity for myself and my three brothers growing up, as my father had, under the strap. Pity for my father who worked and slept, worked and drank and was the dispenser of woe. Our child bodies learning despair, learning to quake and cower -- the raw crimson pain given by the loving hand. No wonder. for a while, animals drew close to us, as if our souls overlapped. And so we died there. And were attended by animals. One dog especially I remember with the brightest gratitude. Miles of night and her wild vowellings under great moons, subsiding into a kind of atrocious laughter, what I think of now as faint gleams of demoniac nature ratifying itself. Somehow that viewless dread she recorded seared my childhood with survival -- she who was mercifully and humbly buried somewhere with a little sotoba over her, bearing the unnecessary text: "Even with such as this animal, the Knowledge Supreme will enfold at last." And so my old friend died. And the cherry blossoms fell sumptuously. And I wrote a little sotoba in my determined child-hand, to insure that never again could they be put back onto our bare branches. |