Tess Gallagher

Opening

I entered this world not wanting

to come. I’ll leave it not

wanting to go. All this while,

when it seemed there were two doors,

there was only one—this

                             passing through.

*

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.

*

Correction

(for my father, Leslie Bond)

When he drank, he who was silent

talked into the night, and early on

you could get anything you

asked for.  I can’t remember

what I asked for, only that he

called me Queenie, a sweet-bitter 

name, for try as he might, it was hard 

by his day to day earnings to keep 

a queen, even a child-queen.  Anciently 

he would tell my brothers and me the dark 

of the coal mines, some proof of his 

delivery from one hell-life to another.

How could a child lift that?  So much

of being young just raw listening, waiting

for life to catch up and add 

meaning.  Time gentled us both 

so at last he could break through 

to plead his case, that time I’d 

come home from studies.  I was 

grown, full of plans that didn’t 

include him.  The Queen was waiting tables,

skivvying for a Russian who

owned a pizza joint on the Ave—

one of three jobs to keep her 

in food and classes.  “If

I’d of known,” my father said,

“I’d of helped you more.”

He’d taken me up wrong, he

said.  “I thought you were just 

off to find a man,”—said with his 

50’s mind of things.  Then, like 

some accident of truth, tears,

and, face to face in that sudden earthly

moment, we could take our bearings 

and enter the stumbling of the heart 

with its stored up light.

*

Is, Is Not

A brief reverie while sitting at the edge

of the Pacific below the house,

admiring the filigree maps of wave-froth

inside the curvature as it rolls

forward and deposits its overlay

of surrendered continents and ocean

partings into the ebb it left

only moments before.  Loss without

sadness!  I take my restorative

like a shoreline whose impression 

is always: something is coming!

~   ~  ~ 

Bird splat on the Belfast hotel 

window.  Then suddenly a red brush

from two stories down among beer

barrels rises like a hydra-headed dragon

to spit a spiral of courtship water

from its center.  Its mating dance, like

some near-extinct bird, scrapes

the sky free of its detritus.  Up and

down it prances on the tight rod

of its mission until I see better

the brick on brick my secret room

is up against.  Who says

nothing works here? 

~   ~  ~ 

We are all now 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.

~   ~  ~ 

“Pat Higgins, the Major, died right

there,” Josie says, pointing to air

at the side of the road on the valley

edge.  “Between one step and

the next.  He was a great character,

fond of his pint, a great worker. He’d

see what there was to do and do

it without orders.  He was popular.”

They pray for him yet on their way

to Highwood mass, and take a blessing

for themselves at the spot where he

fell between two steps: live step, dead

step.  The invisible place marked in

an invisible forever in their on-beating

hearts.  Living step, dying step.  Memory

step, no

Recognition 1

i

In the Company of Flowers 5

Almost Lost Moment 6

Ambition 7

Your Dog Playing with a Coyote 9

Ability to Hold Territory 10

Blind Dog/Seeing Girl 12

Doe Browsing Salal Berries 14

ii

Little Inside Out Dream, 17

Dream Cancel 19

Stolen Dress 21

Glass Impresses 23

Hummingbird-Mind 25

One Deer at Dusk 26

iii

Correction 31

Sully 33

Retroactive Father 36

Earth 38

The Seemingly Domesticated 39

Reaching 41

Right-Minded Person 44

In the Too-Bright Café 45

iv

Let’s Store These Hours 51

Season of Burnt-Out Candelabras 53

The Branches of the Maple 56

Yet to Be Born Weather 57

I Want to Be Loved Like Somebody’s Beloved Dog in America 59

While I Was Away 63

v

Without 67

Deer Path Enigma 69

The Favorite Cup 70

What Does It Say 71

vi

Bus to Belfast 75

Is, Is Not 76

As the Diamond 78

During the Montenegrin Poetry Reading 81

Curfew 83

Eddie’s Steps 84

Four-Footed 86

The Gold Dust of the Linden Trees 88

Blue Eyelid Lifting 91

vii

Button, Button 95

Breath 99

To an Irishman Painting in the Rain 100

Encounter 102

Planet Greece 103

Cloud-Path 105

viii

Oliver 109

A “Sit” with Eileen 112

Remembering Each Other While Together 115

Opening 117

Word of Mouth 118

Daylong Visitor Caress 123

March Moon Three Stars 125

Afterword: Writing from the Edge: A Poet of Two Northwests 127

Notes 135

Acknowledgments 139

‘Gallagher’s poems resound with exquisite beauty and remind me once more how it is not subject but its rendering that redeems and uplifts’ – Boston Globe

‘Tess Gallagher’s is perhaps the most deeply moving and spiritual and intensely intelligent poetry being written in America today’ – William Heyen

‘It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher’s poems without being drawn into their mesmerising rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images’ – Joyce Carol Oates

‘She is outstanding among her contemporaries in the naturalness of her inflection, the fine excess of her spirit, and the energy of her dramatic imagination’ – Stanley Kunitz