Carolyn Forché

The Boatman

We were thirty-one souls, he said, in the gray-sick of sea

in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth.

By morning this didn’t matter, no land was in sight,

all were soaked to the bone, living and dead.

We could still float, we said, from war to war.

What lay behind us but ruins of stone piled on ruins of stone?

City called ‘mother of the poor’ surrounded by fields

of cotton and millet, city of jewelers and cloak-makers,

with the oldest church in Christendom and the Sword of Allah.

If anyone remains there now, he assures, they would be utterly alone.

There is a hotel named for it in Rome two hundred meters

from the Piazza di Spagna, where you can have breakfast under

the portraits of film stars. There the staff cannot do enough for you.

But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night

we fetched a child, not ours, from the sea, drifting face-

down in a life vest, its eyes taken by fish or the birds above us.

After that, Aleppo went up in smoke, and Raqqa came under a rain

of leaflets warning everyone to go. Leave, yes, but go where?

We lived through the Americans and Russians, through Americans

again, many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised

to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive

with no safe place. Leave, yes, we’ll obey the leaflets, but go where?

To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?

To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, where?

You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.

I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.

I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.

*

The Lightkeeper

A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you

still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,

darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.

Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool

you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:

the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,

there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow wick lamps,

whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,

the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.

You say to me, Stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his

lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be

their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.

In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,

seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out

for a long time. Also, when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,

and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.

That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing

to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread

from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.

*

Exile

The city of your childhood rises between steppe and sea, wheat and light,

white with the dust of cockleshells, stargazers, and bones of pipefish,

city of limestone soft enough to cut with a hatchet, where the sea

unfurls and acacias brought by Greeks on their ships

turn white in summer. So yes, you remember, this is the city you lost,

city of smugglers and violinists, chess players and monkeys,

an opera house, a madhouse, a ghost church with wind for its choir

where two things were esteemed: literature and ships, poetry and the sea.

If you return now, it will not be as a being visible to others, and when

you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed, but rather as if

someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why.

If you return, your father will be alive to prepare for you

his mint-cucumber soup or give you the little sweet called bird’s milk,

and after hours of looking with him for his sandals lost near the sea,

you visit again together the amusement park where

your ancestors are buried, and then go home to the apartment house

built by German prisoners of war, to whom your father gave bread,

which you remember surprised you. You take the tram to a stop

where it is no longer possible to get off, and he walks

with you until he vanishes, still holding in his own your invisible hand.

*

In Time of War

And so we stayed, night after night awake

until the moon fell behind the blackened cypress,

and bats returned to their caverns having gorged

on the night air, and all remained still until the hour

of rising, when the headless woman was no longer seen

nor a ghostly drum heard, nor anyone taking

the form of mist or a fiddler, and the box never opened

by itself, nor were there whispers or other sounds, no rustling

dress or pet ape trapped in a secret passage, but there was

labored breathing, and unseen hands leafing through

the pages of a visitor’s book, and above the ruins a girl

in white lace, and five or more candles floating,

and someone did see a white dog bound into a nearby

wood, but there were neither bagpipes nor smiling skull,

no skeletons piled in the oubliette, and there was,

as it turned out, no yellow monkey, no blood

leaking from a slit throat, and no one saw

a woman carrying the severed head,

but there were children standing on their own

graves and there was the distant rumble of cannon.

*

Transport

Oxen-yoked carts go with us, and also bicycle rickshaws,

three-wheeled carts, small trucks, taxis and cooled private cars,

human-yoked carts piled with tea and textiles, and along

the way they toot their horns. To pass on the right,

you toot your horn, also to pass on the left or pull ahead.

Even the loping oxen understand the music.

We are told—is it true?—that if our driver struck

a man on foot, we should run away before the car

is torched by the crowd and its driver killed.

This thought became taxis burning in sleep.

The newness of the car determines our distance from the world.

Behind smoked windows, with the air on,

it is possible to travel at great distance

from all that is about us: bathers by the roadside pouring

cold pails over soaped flesh, smoke rising from long metal

stoves, women stirring pots, sadhus and other holy ones,

with their infinite paths to God. On foot then. Go on foot.

15 Museum of Stones

16 The Boatman

17 Water Crisis

18 Report from an Island

19 The Last Puppet

21 The Lightkeeper

22 The Crossing

23 Exile

24 Fisherman

25 For Ilya at Tsarskoye Selo

26 The Lost Suitcase

28 Last Bridge

30 Elegy for an Unknown Poet

32 Letter to a City Under Siege

33 Travel Papers

38 The Refuge of Art

40 A Room

45 The Ghost of Heaven

48 Ashes to Guazapa

49 Hue: From a Notebook

50 Morning on the Island

51 A Bridge

52 The End of Something

53 Early Life

54 Tapestry

55 Visitation

56 In Time of War

57 Lost Poem

58 Charmolypi

59 Souffrance

60 Sanctuary

61 Uninhabited

62 Clouds

63 Passage

64 Light of Sleep

65 Theologos

67 Mourning

68 Transport

69 Early Confession

70 Toward the End

72 What Comes

75 Dedications and notes

76 Acknowledgements

'It has been 17 years since Carolyn Forché published a book of poems, and In the Lateness of the World announces she is back. Coming fast on the heels of her memoir of last year  this book is bursting with poems of migration, crossing, and looking back. It is as if the poet is standing, one foot in the river, wondering which way the next crossing will go. Drawing on her own travels and periods of reporting, on the world’s seemingly endless upheaval, these poems move beyond disquiet and creates the charged ethical field in which we all live, all the time, especially at that moment we move.'  – John Freeman, Lit Hub

‘Again Carolyn Forché hovers above the lacerated landscape of history filling the holes “between saying and said”. Blue Hour does not console but emboldens. The fear we share is never dodged. This singular voice is writ in bone, snow, coal, stone and sorrow.’ – C.D Wright

‘Carolyn Forché makes a complex voice for all the mute victims of our destructive world as the killing goes on and the patterns of our lives continue our committed self-destruction. Hers is the heroism which still cares.’ – Robert Creeley

‘Part of poetry’s tragic knowledge is that elegy is endless. Yet in its power to recall and to memorialise, elegy also effaces time and reinvests loss, the lost, with life. It is a form of overcoming, essential to our knowing of, and dwelling in, the present and to our becoming human… Carolyn Forché is one of the contemporary masters of that form, that act’ – Michael Palmer