Thursday, March 26, 2015

March, 2015

FEATURED POET: Tess Gallagher:  Her ninth volume of poetry, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, was made available October 2011 from Graywolf Press. Other poetry includes Dear Ghosts, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Amplitude.  Gallagher’s The Man from Kenvara: Selected Stories was published fall 2009.  In 2008 Blackstaff Press in Belfast published Barnacle SoupStories from the West of Ireland, a collaboration with the Sligo storyteller Josie Gray.  Gallagher is also the author of Amplitude, Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray, A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry, and two collections of short fiction: At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and Other Stories. She also spearheaded the publication of Raymond Carver’s Beginners as a single volume first by Jonathan Cape in the UK in fall of 2009 and now forthcoming in September 2015 by Vintage.  Most recently she companioned the production of the film BIRDMAN, directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, which uses a story and a poem of Raymond Carver’s.  The film garnered four 2015 Oscar awards.  She spends time in a cottage on Lough Arrow in Co. Sligo in the West of Ireland where many of her new poems are set, and also lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington.

*Bio adapted from Academy of American Poets.  Poems used with permission. Images of Tess painted by Alfredo Arreguin.


   



During the Montenegrin Poetry Reading

Mira, like a white goddess, is translating
so my left ear is a cave near Kotor
where the sea lashes and rakes
the iron darkness inside
the black mountains.  Young and old, the poets
are letting us know this sweltering night,
under a bridge near a river outside
Karver Bookstore at the beginning of July,
belongs to them.  They clear away debris

about politicians and personal suffering,
these gladiators of desire
and doubt, whose candor has roiled
me like a child shaking stolen beer to foam
the genie of the moment out of
its bottle.   The poets’ truth-wrought poems dragging it
out of me,  that confession--that I didn’t have children
probably because in some clear corner I knew I would have left them
to join these poets half a world away who, in their language
that is able to break stones, have broken me open
like a melon.   Instead of children, I leave my small dog, quivering
as I touched her on the nose, to let her know it’s

me, the one who is always leaving her, yes
I’m going, and for her I have no language with
which to reassure her I’m coming

back, no—what’s the use to pretend I’m
a good mistress to her, she who would never
leave me, she who looks for me everywhere
I am not, until I return.  I should feel guilty
but the Montenegrin poets have taken false guilt off
the table.  I’ve been swallowed by a cosmic
sneer, with an entire country behind it where
each day it occurs to them how many are still missing
in that recent past of war and havoc. 

Nothing to do but shut the gate behind me
and not look back where my scent
even now is fading from the grass. Nostalgia
for myself won’t be tolerated here.  I’m just a beast
who, if my dog were a person, would give me a pat
on the head and say something stupid like: Good dog.




I Have Never Wanted to March

or wear an epaulet. Once I walked
in a hometown parade to celebrate
a salmon derby. I was seven, my hair in
pigtails, a steel flasher strapped diagonally
across my chest bandolier-style
(in Catalan bandolera from banda––band
of people–and bandoler meaning bandit).
My black bandit boots were rubber
because here on the flanks of the Olympics
it always rains on our parades.

I believe I pushed a doll buggy.
I believe all parades, especially military
parades, could be improved if
the soldiers wore bandoliers made to attract
fish, and if each soldier pushed a doll buggy
inside which were real-seeming babies,
their all-seeing doll-eyes open
to reflect the flight of birds, of balloons
escaped from the hands of children to
hover over the town—higher than flags, higher
than minarets and steeples.

What soldier could forget
collateral damage with those baby faces
locked to their chin straps? It is
conceivable soldiers would resist
pushing doll buggies. Bending over
might spoil the rigidity of their marching.
What about a manual exhorting the patriotic
duty of pushing doll buggies? Treatises
on the symbolic meaning would need to be
written. Hollywood writers might be of use.
Poets and historians could collaborate,
reminding the marchers of chariots, of
Trojan horses, of rickshaws, of any wheeled
conveyance ever pulled, pushed or driven
in the service of humankind.

I would like, for instance, to appear
in the next parade as a Trojan horse. When
they open me I’ll be seven years old.
There will be at least seven of me
inside me, for effect, and because it’s
a mystical number. I won’t understand
much about war, in any case—especially
its good reasons. I’ll just want to be pushed
over some border into enemy territory, and
when no one’s thinking anything except: what
a pretty horse! I’ll throw open myself
like a flank and climb out, all
seven of me, like a many-legged spider
of myself. I’ll speak only
in poetry, my second language, because it
is beautifully made for exploring the miraculous
ordinary event––in which an alchemy
of words agrees to apprentice itself to the possible
as it evades the impossible. Also poetry
doesn’t pretend to know answers and speaks best
in questions, the way children do
who want to know everything, and don’t believe
only what they’re told. I’ll be seven
unruly children when they open me up,
and I’ll invite the children of the appointed enemy
to climb into my horse for a ride. We’ll be secret
together, the way words are
the moment before they are spoken—
those Trojan horses of silence, looking for a border

to roll across like oversized toys
manned by serious children—until one horse
has been pushed back and forth
with its contraband of mutually pirated children
so many times it will be clear to any adult watching
this unseemly display, that enemy territory
is everywhere when anyone’s child is at stake, when
the language of governments is reduced to ultimatums,
when it wants to wear epaulets
and to march without
Its doll buggy.

But maybe and edict or two could be made
by one child-ventriloquist through the mouth
of the horse, proposing that the advent of atrocities
be forestalled by much snorting, neighing, prancing and
tail swishing—by long, exhausted parades
of reciprocal child-hostages who may be
rescued only in the language of poetry
which insists on being lucid
and mysterious at once, like a child’s hand
appearing from under the tail
of the horse, blindly waiving to make sure that anyone
lined up along the street does not submit entirely
to the illusion of their absence, their
ever-squandered innocence, their hyper-responsive
minds in which a ladybug would actually fly away,
with only its tiny flammable wings,
to save its children from the burning house.