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Overview
*A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Poetry Book of Fall 2011*
We brave into ourselves each time
we put on our lantern-light
and step out—as a gleam steps
out its overlapping forms
to lift a path from its nest of darkness.
—from "Midnight Lantern"
In Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, Tess Gallagher collects her indispensable work from forty years of writing poetry, along with an ample new section written in the west of Ireland. Included in this generous book are Gallagher's signature nocturnes—for the changing Pacific Northwest, for her hardscrabble childhood, and for her late husband, Raymond Carver, and others. Her challenging new work confronts a tumultuous century's worth of art, warfare, and illness, while certifying the stubborn resilience of poetry and love. Astonishing, insightful, mischievous, an inimitable "seeing-into experience," Midnight Lantern is the essential book by a poet in the prime of her power.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555975975 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 09/27/2011 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Tess Gallagher is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, screenplay writer, and translator. Her previous poetrycollections include Dear Ghosts, and Moon Crossing Bridge. She lives in Washington State and the west of Ireland.
Read an Excerpt
Midnight Lantern
New & Selected PoemsBy Tess Gallagher
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2011 Tess GallagherAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-597-5
Chapter One
When You Speak to MeTake care when you speak to me.
I might listen, I might
draw near as the flame
breathing with the log, breathing
with the tree it has not
forgotten. I might
put my face
next to
your face
in your nameless trouble,
in your trouble
and name.
It is a thing I learned
without learning; a hand
is a stronger mouth, a kiss could
crack the skull, these
words, small steps
in the air calling
the secret hands, the mouths
hidden in the flesh.
This isn't robbery.
This isn't your blood for my
tears, no confidence
in trade or barter. I may
say nothing back
which is to hear
after you the fever
inside the words we say
apart, the words we say so hard
they fall apart.
Instructions to the Double
So now it's your turn,
little mother of silences, little
father of half-belief. Take up
this face, these daily rounds
with a cabbage under each arm
convincing the multitudes
that a well-made-anything
could save them. Take up
most of all, these hands
trained to an ornate piano
in a house on the other side
of the country.
I'm staying here
without music, without
applause. I'm not going
to wait up for you. Take
your time. Take mine
too. Get into some trouble
I'll have to account for. Walk
into some bars alone
with a slit in your skirt. Let
the men follow you on the street
with their clumsy propositions, their
loud hatreds of this and that. Keep
walking. Keep your head
up. They are calling to you-slut, mother,
virgin, whore, daughter, adulteress, lover,
mistress, bitch, wife, cunt, harlot,
betrothed, Jezebel, Messalina, Diana,
Bathsheba, Rebecca, Lucretia, Mary,
Magdelena, Ruth, you—Niobe,
woman of the tombs.
Don't stop for anything, not
a caress or a promise. Go
to the temple of the poets, not
the one like a run-down country club,
but the one on fire
with so much it wants
to be done with. Say all the last words
and the first: hello, goodbye, yes,
I, no, please, always, never.
If anyone from the country club
asks you to write poems, say
your name is Lizzie Borden.
Show him your axe, the one
they gave you with a silver
blade, your name engraved there
like a whisper of their own.
If anyone calls you a witch,
burn for him; if anyone calls you
less or more than you are
let him burn for you.
It's a dangerous mission. You
could die out there. You
could live forever.
Beginning to Say No
is not to offer so much as a fist, is
to walk away firmly, as though
you had settled something foolish,
is to wear a tarantula in your buttonhole
yet smile invitingly, unmindful
how your own blood grows toward the irreversible
bite. No, I will not
go with you. No, that is not
all right. I'm not your sweet-dish, your
home-cooking, good-looking daffodil.
Yes is no
reason to slay the Cyclops. No
will not save it. And the cricket, "Yes, yes."
Fresh bait, fresh bait!
The search for the right hesitation
includes finally
unobstructed waters. Goodbye,
old happy-go-anyhow, old shoe
for any weather. Whose
candelabra are you? Whose
soft-guy, nevermind, nothing-to-lose anthill?
"And," the despised connective,
is really an engine
until it is yes all day, until a light
is thrown against a wall
with some result. And
there is less doubt, yes or no,
for whatever you have been compelled to say
more than once.
Breasts
The day you came
this world got its hold on me.
Summer grass and the four of us pounding hell
out of each other for god knows what
green murder of the skull.
Swart nubbins, I noticed you then,
my mother shaking a gritty rag from the porch
to get my shirt on this minute. Brothers,
that was the parting of our ways, for then
you got me down by something else than flesh.
By the loose skin of a cotton shirt
you kept me to the ground
until the bloody gout hung in my face like a web.
Little mothers, I can't find your children.
I have looked in a man
who moved through the air like a god.
He brought me clouds
and the loose stars of his goings.
Another kissed me on a pier in Georgia
but there was blood on his hands,
bad whiskey in the wind. The last one,
he made me a liar until I stole
what I could not win. Loves,
what is this mirror you have left me in?
I could have told you at the start
there would be trouble
from other hands, how the sharp mouths
would find you where you slept.
But I have hurt you as certainly
with cold sorrowing as anyone,
have come the long way
over broken ground to this softness.
Good clowns, how could I know, all along
it was your blundering mercies kept me alive
when heaven was a luckless dream.
The Woman Who Raised Goats
Dear ones, in those days it was otherwise.
I was suited more to an obedience
of windows. If anyone had asked,
I would have said: "Windows are my prologue."
My father worked on the docks
in a cold little harbor, unhappily
dedicated to what was needed
by the next and further
harbors. My brothers
succeeded him in this, but when I,
in that town's forsaken luster, offered myself,
the old men in the hiring hall creeled
back in their chairs, fanning themselves
with their cards, with their gloves.
"Saucy," they said. "She's saucy!"
Denial, O my Senators,
takes a random shape. The matter
drove me to wearing
a fedora. Soon, the gowns, the amiable
forgeries: a powdery sailor, the blue silk
pillow given by a great aunt, my name
embroidered on it like a ship, the stitched
horse too, with its red plume and its bird eyes
glowing. There was the education
of my "sensibilities."
All this is nothing to you.
You have eaten my only dress, and the town
drifts every day now
toward the harbor. But always,
above the town, above
the harbor, there is the town,
the harbor, the caves and hollows
when the cargo of lights
is gone.
Black Money
His lungs heaving all day in a sulphur mist,
then dusk, the lunch pail torn from him
before he reaches the house, his children
a cloud of swallows about him.
At the stove in the tumbled rooms, the wife,
her back the wall he fights most, and she
with no weapon but silence
and to keep him from the bed.
In their sleep the mill hums and turns
at the edge of water. Blue smoke
swells the night and they drift
from the graves they have made for each other,
float out from the open-mouthed sleep
of their children, past banks and businesses,
the used car lots, liquor store, the swings in the park.
The mill burns on, now a burst of cinders,
now whistles screaming down the bay, saws jagged
in half-light. Then like a whip
the sun across the bed, windows high with mountains
and the sleepers fallen to pillows
as gulls fall, tilting
against their shadows on the log booms.
Again the trucks shudder the wood-framed houses
passing to the mill. My father
snorts, splashes in the bathroom,
throws open our doors to cowboy music
on the radio. Hearts are cheating,
somebody is alone, there's blood in Tulsa.
Out the back yard the night-shift men rattle
the gravel in the alley going home.
My father fits goggles to his head.
From his pocket he takes anything metal,
the pearl-handled jack knife, a ring of keys,
and for us, black money shoveled
from the sulphur pyramids heaped in the distance
like yellow gold. Coffee bottle tucked in his armpit
he swaggers past the chicken coop,
a pack of cards at his breast.
In a fan of light beyond him
the Kino Maru pulls out for Seattle,
some black star climbing
the deep globe of his eye.
Kidnaper
He motions me over with a question.
He is lost. I believe him. It seems
he calls my name. I move
closer. He says it again, the name
of someone he loves. I step back pretending
not to hear. I suspect
the street he wants
does not exist, but I am glad to point
away from myself. While he turns
I slip off my wristwatch, already laying a trail
for those who must find me
tumbled like an abandoned car
into the ravine. I lie
without breath for days among ferns.
Pine needles drift
onto my face and breasts
like the tiny hands
of watches. Cars pass.
I imagine it's him
coming back. My death
is not needed. The sun climbs again
for everyone. He lifts me
like a bride
and the leaves fall from my shoulders
in twenty-dollar bills.
"You must have been cold," he says
covering me with his handkerchief.
"You must have given me up."
Stepping Outside
for Akhmatova
Hearing of you, I never lost a brother
though I have, never saw a husband to war,
though I have, never kept with my father
the emptiness of his hands, my mother
the dying of her womb.
Return: husbands, sons, fathers return.
Many with both arms, with dreams
broken in both eyes.
They try, they try
but they cannot tell us
what comes back with them.
One more has planted his hoe
in my heart like an axe, my farmer uncle
slain by thieves
in the night, burned down
with his house, buried, dug up
to prove he was no dog.
He was no dog.
You, who lived in your pain until it grew
its own face, would have left all this
like a monument in a field. Your words
would have made a feast of what ate you.
Sit with me.
No one has left; no one returns.
Two Stories
(To the author of a story taken from the death
of my uncle, Porter Morris, murdered June 7,
1972, Windyville, Missouri)
You kept the names, the flies
of who they were, mine
gone carnival, ugly Tessie.
It got wilder but nothing
personal. The plot had me
an easy lay for a buck.
My uncle came to life
as my lover. At 16
the murderer stabbed cows
and mutilated chickens. Grown,
you gave him a crowbar that happened
to be handy twice. Then you made him
do it alone. For me
it took three drunks, a gun, the house
on fire. There was a black space
between trees where I told you.
The shape of my uncle
spread its arms on the wire springs
in the yard and the neighbors
came to look at his shadow
caught there under the nose
of his dog. They left that angel
to you. Your killer never
mentioned money. Like us he wanted
to outlive his hand in the sure blood
of another. The veins of my uncle streaked
where the house had been. They watched
until morning. Your man found a faucet
in an old man's side. His pants
were stiff with it for days. He left
the crowbar on Tessie's porch like a bone.
My weapon was never found.
The murderers drove a white
station wagon and puked
as they went. They hoped
for 100 dollar bills stuffed
in a lard can. But a farmer
keeps his money in cattle
and land. They threw his billfold
into the ditch like an empty
bird. One ran away. Two stayed
with women. I kept the news
blind. You took it from my mouth,
shaped it for the market, still
a dream worse than I remembered.
Now there is the story of me
reading your story and the one
of you saying it
doesn't deserve such care.
I say it matters
that the dog stays by the chimney
for months, and a rain
soft as the sleep of cats
enters the land, emptied
of its cows, its wire gates pulled down
by hands that never dug
the single well, this whitened field.
The Calm
We were walking through the bees
and stars. Our mouths
made a sense without us.
I loved your hands
because of your mouth, each star
because of a life not chosen
by the hand. I told you,
don't say it, the loss
of our lives beyond us. You
said it. You said it
for the sake of a loneliness
together, for the praise of our eyes
going on without shadows.
Even now, when all our nights
have washed away
and the apples have left
the trees, I am keeping your place
where the high grass
has entered the song. Like a swarm,
the heart moves with its separate
wings under the eaves.
If I knew where to find you
I would say good-bye
and have the hurtful ease of that,
but the gates are everywhere
and this calm—an imagined forgiveness,
the childhood before we meet again.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Midnight Lantern by Tess Gallagher Copyright © 2011 by Tess Gallagher . Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
When You Speak to Me....................3Instructions to the Double....................4
Beginning to Say No....................6
Breasts....................7
The Woman Who Raised Goats....................9
Black Money....................11
Kidnaper....................13
Stepping Outside....................14
Two Stories....................15
The Calm....................17
Corona....................18
Snowheart....................20
Coming Home....................21
Rhododendrons....................23
Women's Tug of War at Lough Arrow....................27
On Your Own....................28
Woman-Enough....................29
The Ritual of Memories....................31
The Ballad of Ballymote....................34
Disappearances in the Guarded Sector....................36
Open Fire near a Shed....................38
Love Poem to Be Read to an Illiterate Friend....................40
Second Language....................42
Ever After....................45
My Mother Remembers That She Was Beautiful....................48
Under Stars....................50
Sudden Journey....................53
Unsteady Yellow....................54
From Dread in the Eyes of Horses....................55
Death of the Horses by Fire....................56
3 A.M. Kitchen: My Father Talking....................58
Accomplishment....................60
Black Silk....................62
Candle, Lamp & Firefly....................63
The Hug....................65
Woodcutting on Lost Mountain....................67
Gray Eyes....................74
Linoleum....................76
Each Bird Walking....................79
Bird-Window-Flying....................81
Refusing Silence....................85
If Poetry Were Not a Morality....................86
With Stars....................89
His Shining Helmet; Its Horsehair Crest....................91
All Day the Light Is Clear....................93
Photograph of a Lighthouse through Fog....................94
Present....................96
Cougar Meat....................99
The Hands of the Blindman....................102
Rijl....................103
Bonfire....................105
Yes....................111
Red Poppy....................112
Wake....................113
Corpse Cradle....................114
Reading the Waterfall....................115
Trace, in Unison....................117
Black Pudding....................118
Now That I Am Never Alone....................120
Souvenir....................121
Embers....................123
Two of Anything....................124
Cold Crescent....................126
After the Chinese....................127
Black Valentine....................128
Fresh Stain....................129
Rain-soaked Valentine....................130
Meeting beyond Meeting....................131
Paradise....................132
Ebony....................133
Fathomless....................134
Deaf Poem....................135
We're All Pharaohs When We Die....................137
Moon Crossing Bridge....................139
Spacious Encounter....................140
Anniversary....................142
I Stop Writing the Poem....................144
Cherry Blossoms....................145
Knotted Letter....................146
Picking Bones....................148
At the-Place-of-Sadness....................150
Infinite Room....................151
Glow....................152
Un Extraño....................153
I Don't Know You....................155
While I Sit in a Sunny Place....................157
The Forest She Was Trying to Say....................158
Sea inside the Sea....................160
Kisses from the Inside....................162
A Light That Works Itself into the Mind....................163
Near, As All That Is Lost....................164
Widow in Red Shoes....................169
Kiss without a Body....................170
His Moment....................171
Letter to a Kiss That Died for Us....................172
Poems Written about Kisses....................173
In the Laboratory of Kisses....................174
Fable of a Kiss....................175
Kissing the Blindman....................177
Glimpse inside an Arrow after Flight....................178
Lynx Light....................179
Like the Sigh of Women's Hair....................180
Cameo....................181
Black Violets....................182
Elegy with a Blue Pony....................183
To Whom Can I Open My Heart?....................187
Urgent Story....................188
Because the Dream Is My Tenderest Arm....................190
With Her Words beside Me....................192
When the Enemy Is Illiterate....................194
For Yvonne....................195
Utterly....................196
No, Not Paradise....................197
Laughter and Stars....................198
Two Bracelets....................201
Child Singing....................204
Iris Garden in May....................206
My Unopened Life....................211
Not a Sparrow....................213
Sah Sin....................215
Choices....................218
Fire Starter....................219
Little Match Box....................222
The Women of Auschwitz....................223
Surgeon....................226
The Red Devil....................228
Bull's-Eye....................229
Orange Sutra....................230
Dream Doughnuts....................232
You Are Like That,....................234
Oil Spot....................236
Moon's Rainbow Body....................238
Dear Ghosts,....................239
Knives in the Borrowed House....................241
Sugarcane....................242
Weather Report....................245
Eternal....................246
Emanation of the Red Child....................248
She Wipes Out Time....................250
The Violence of Unseen Forms....................253
Across the Border....................255
In Lilac-Light....................257
With Setouchi-san in Kyoto....................260
Sixteenth Anniversary....................262
What the New Day Is For....................266
Comeback....................269
Death's Ink....................271
Red Perch....................277
Sruthlinn Spring....................279
Maurice's Foal....................280
Perished....................282
Horse Dealers....................284
Ballerina....................285
Brushing Fate....................286
Lie Down with the Lamb....................288
Eyelets....................290
Small and Indestructible....................291
Jealous....................292
Contraband....................294
Mr. and Mrs. Rat....................296
Abandoned Lunch....................297
A Fozy Bog....................299
Barrie Cooke Painting....................301
Irish Weather....................305
Walking on Annaugh Loy....................306
Small Hut....................309
Between the Voice and the Feather....................312
Signature....................313
Tiernan at Five....................315
Karver Bookstore: Montenegro....................316
Desolate Road....................319
Eating Yellow....................320
The Tallest Men in Europe....................321
Sitting at Lorca's Piano....................322
A Dusky Glow at Glenstaughey....................324
Abbey Ballindoon....................325
Midnight Lantern....................327
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