Is, Is Not Read online

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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

  Blue Eyelid Lifting

  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

  silently under again, I turned for proof

  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