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Is, Is Not
ALSO BY TESS GALLAGHER
POETRY
Boogie-Woogie Crisscross(with Lawrence Matsuda)
Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems
Dear Ghosts,
My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems
Portable Kisses
Moon Crossing Bridge
Amplitude: New and Selected Poems
Willingly
Under Stars
Instructions to the Double
FICTION
The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories
Barnacle Soup: Stories from the West of Ireland (with Josie Gray)
At the Owl Woman Saloon
The Lover of Horses and Other Stories
ESSAYS
Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (edited by Holly J. Hughes, introduction by Tess Gallagher)
Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (edited by Greg Simon)
A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry
Carver Country (photographs by Bob Adelman, introduction by Tess Gallagher)
A New Path to the Waterfall (Raymond Carver, introduction by Tess Gallagher)
Alfredo Arreguin’s World of Wonders: Critical Perspectives (“Viva La Vida” by Tess Gallagher)
All of Us (Raymond Carver, introduction by Tess Gallagher)
TRANSLATION
A Path to the Sea: Poems by Liliana Ursu (with Adam J. Sorkin and the poet, translator’s note by Tess Gallagher)
Marina Tsvetaeva: The Essential Poetry (introduction by Tess Gallagher)
The Sky behind the Forest: Selected Poems by Liliana Ursu (with Adam J. Sorkin and the poet)
Is, Is Not
Poems
Tess Gallagher
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2019 by Tess Gallagher
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-841-9
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-888-4
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2019
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958155
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
Cover art: Josie Gray, Blue Eyelid Lifting
for Josie Gray and for Raymond Carver
CONTENTS
Recognition
i
In the Company of Flowers
Almost Lost Moment
Ambition
Your Dog Playing with a Coyote
Ability to Hold Territory
Blind Dog/Seeing Girl
Doe Browsing Salal Berries
ii
Little Inside Out Dream,
Dream Cancel
Stolen Dress
Glass Impresses
Hummingbird-Mind
One Deer at Dusk
iii
Correction
Sully
Retroactive Father
Earth
The Seemingly Domesticated
Reaching
Right-Minded Person
In the Too-Bright Café
iv
Let’s Store These Hours
Season of Burnt-Out Candelabras
The Branches of the Maple
Yet to Be Born Weather
I Want to Be Loved Like Somebody’s Beloved Dog in America
While I Was Away
v
Without
Deer Path Enigma
The Favorite Cup
What Does It Say
vi
Bus to Belfast
Is, Is Not
As the Diamond
During the Montenegrin Poetry Reading
Curfew
Eddie’s Steps
Four-Footed
The Gold Dust of the Linden Trees
vii
Button, Button
Breath
To an Irishman Painting in the Rain
Encounter
Planet Greece
Cloud-Path
viii
Oliver
A “Sit” with Eileen
Remembering Each Other While Together
Opening
Word of Mouth
Daylong Visitor
Caress
March Moon
Three Stars
Afterword: Writing from the Edge: A Poet of Two Northwests
Notes
Acknowledgments
RECOGNITION
Staring down from the bridge
at the moon
broken up
in the river, who
could know, without looking
up, it stands whole above
its shattered self.
i
Am I real? Do I exist?
And will I really die?
OSIP MANDELSTAM
IN THE COMPANY OF FLOWERS
all day, coming away
like an ordinary person who
might have been at a till. Thinking
as I dug into earth of my mother
who, when my youngest brother
died, was taken in
by beauty, not as consolation
but because she found him
there as she made the garden.
Each day she tended it
he kept a little more
of her. If ever I doubt
the power of the dead, I walk
her garden in May, rhododendrons
so red, so white their clustered goblets
spill translucent tongues of light at the rim
of the sea. And it is ordinary
to be so accompanied,
so fused to the silence of all that,
as it eludes me, as I am taken in.
Surely my reappearance must wear
the borrowed abundance she
gave me that morning
I was born.
ALMOST LOST MOMENT
coming back in an incidental way,
claiming to be the most beautiful
moment of my life: braiding
her waist-length white hair by the Pacific
at La Push. Hand over
hand, the three-way crossings
of apportioned strands, and quiet,
her head braced against my gentle pull
as she gazes ou
t. Both in our sea-minds.
And quiet.
Quiet.
for Georgia Morris Bond,
my mother
AMBITION
We had our heads down
baiting hooks—three wild salmon
already turned back that morning
for the in-season hatchery silvers
now out there somewhere
counting their luck—when
under our small boat the sea
gave a roll like a giant turning over
in sleep, lifting us high so I thought
an ocean liner or freighter had
slipped up on us, the sudden heft
of its bow-wave, our matchstick toss
to depth we’d taken
for granted in order to venture there
at all. But when I looked up expecting
collision, the quash of water from their
blowholes pushed to air in unison,
a pair of gray whales not two hundred
yards away: “Look up!” I shouted so you
didn’t miss the fear-banishing
of their passage that made
nothing of us. Not even death could touch
any mind of us. It was all beauty and
mystery, the kind that picks you up
effortlessly and darts through you
for just those moments
you aren’t even there. Held that way
and their tons-weight bodies plunged
to you, but the clarity was passing through
as a swell under us again and the sky of the sea
set us down like a toy.
And that’s the way it was, and it wasn’t
any other way—just looking at each other,
helpless one thought and huge with power
the next. We baited up,
dropped our herring into slack water—
two ghosts fishing for anything but whales.
for my brother Tom
YOUR DOG PLAYING WITH A COYOTE
—a notion not out of place
where bears hunch under apple
trees at night like rocking chairs
with volition. She’s lonely, your dog,
and the young coyote waits for her at the edge
of the forest. Not sinister that tongue
laughing wildness when she
dashes forward to feign attack, then glances
away. If your dog chases too far,
what then? Joining wilder kin to rove
at borders suddenly treacherous? What does
dusk have to do with their marauding?
Some ancient tincture of permission
allows the edge of night
to blend where wild and tame
exchange fur in one naked, human
mind—my thinking toward them
to grant wilderness its emissary.
Coyote, whose very appearance takes
whisper to its highest pitch—then breaks
the play-form of invitation to withdraw,
shedding with a guiltless, backward
look, this unbidden fringe-work—to rejoin
her serial moons, her black on black
of night, our freshened
immensity.
ABILITY TO HOLD TERRITORY
The chilla is the fox Charles Darwin
killed by walking up and hitting it
on the head with a hammer
while it was “intently watching
the activity” of the Beagle’s crew.
Notoriously unwary of humans, “It
doesn’t know to hide from hunters.”
In effect, it steps off the ladder
of evolution where “ability to hold territory
supersedes ability to adapt
to environmental changes.”
The women huddle in the Men’s
in the Turkish airport. Gun shots
ring out, then massive explosions. Escaping
down a stairwell, the talisman
of a woman’s scarf, then a smeared
footprint where blood outleaped
its borders.
It wasn’t the first time a wrongheaded
freedom had taken the floor
of our assembly. The surprise was
that the head actually rolled down the aisle
toward my bench where my foot
took hold of me and kicked it
mercilessly out the door.
Now we are all tossed out
into straw, or worse,
a ditch. I study my watch as if
a mistake in time would
repeal what was inconceivable
only days before. Hammer
of the mind, come down
on the glass of this hour, and
spread alarm! Each choice
does small or large harm, but
to do nothing is to cease
to exist and banish worlds.
BLIND DOG/SEEING GIRL
She travels by guess and by
mistakes she corrects
by going back the wrong
way, bumping sometimes
painfully into things with her
whole face like houses and
tree trunks and door
jambs. She can’t get there
except by correction, extending
her chin against the stairs as if
they were the stars, to caress
each oncoming cement
ledge. If she didn’t venture
and get it wrong and eventually
right, she’d be at a standstill, marooned
out there under the apple trees or
hemlock. Don’t
carry her, says the girl to
herself, you’ll mix her up
in there in her dark-finding
where she’s collecting
mistakes and self-forgiveness,
making good on excited passages
where it seems each turnabout
yields a fresh chance at getting back
to the girl. And what is the girl
for? To clap her hands helplessly over
and over and chant “This way! This
way!” And because the dog is also deaf,
the girl is there to follow her
to her neighbor’s porch where
the dog scratches to be let
in. The girl is there to explain, to
apologize: “She’s blind, she’s deaf,”
and in quiet defeat to snap the lead
on the dog’s collar and guide her home
where in relative safety she releases her
again into her lostness from which
the dog must design
a freedom-map among the galaxies
of blind orbits, brailled
edges, and comets of the moment.
Even the girl knows in her sighted
witnessing: we are each
lost, and beholden until,
with deer-like tentative stepping,
each invisible threshold yields, and
still calling in her useless voice,
the girl forfeits all notion of possessing
the zigzagged way her exactly there dog
at last hazards herself into
her waiting arms. And isn’t it joy
the dog expresses as the world
dissolves into just that moment
she has magically united with
her very own missing girl.
DOE BROWSING SALAL BERRIES
My restraint in pruning allows
another harvest. Blue-black pearls
cling to flexible combs, bounty
her tongue searches out from
rhododendron leaves, all but
subsumed by salal. We exchange
a long you-there stare
before she edges her muzzle in again,
then lifts the right hoof,
flicking her ears to engage some
possibly threatening unseen.
The day will turn, night will come
over her. The way it knows
to leave everything where it was
as she moves like a shadow
with its own volition
back into her forest.
ii
Give my dream back,
raven! The moon you woke me to
is misted over.
UEJIMA ONITSURA
LITTLE INSIDE OUT DREAM,
how real you are, bringing me
the morning glories of my
two old friends as young
on a full-moon night. How
sad-happy it was to embrace
them, for he was also my old
love, and she—his eventual
bride; but forget that since time
had slipped its knot—his
mother was dying; we were
thumping the dark of that
when moonlight ignited
our corner of fortunate
intersection, brailling the moment
with the memory-chill
of lilies, and my alive-again mother
braiding my hair the night before
to take the hurry out of a school
morning. How tightly she pulled
to the back of my head, as if
she were climbing a moon-ladder
into this faraway moment. Then
I handed her the silk ribbons, one
by one, to secure the ends
and to hide the rubber bands
doing the real job of holding. How
I loved those mother-hands!
And silk. And that you brought
your sorrow to me, even though
all we were to each other across time
was young and
abandoned by mothers.
DREAM CANCEL
There is no in to the dream,
though closing the eyes to go there
would seem entrance, an interior
that closes one over, the Russian dolls’
papier-mâché replicas hooding serial
invitations you have to accept.
For in sleep we do submit, and the notion
long held of “waking up” does not free us
if the dream-mind does its
handstand in the corner.
Relieved of “waking” as permission to