Is, Is Not

by Tess Gallagher

dismiss the second-class life

  of the dream with its colorful

  cargo of talking bears and the ogre

  wearing the ruby amulet—we live

  unrepentantly on gingerbread doorknobs

  and edible glass, our child fears hand-in-hand

  with child delights, while the dreamer

  gets more brazen in the witness-box of

  daylight: Not real! Only a dream!

  Yet, the hands are sticky,

  the tongue coiled to the memory

  of molasses. Oh stick your finger out

  of the cage of sleep, little girl, so we can

  rub your finger bone! But the mind

  in the corner with its skirt fallen

  over its daylight cries No! then substitutes

  a chicken bone. And if your brother

  is eaten in another room, you somehow meet

  down a long cavernous hallway

  where the melting polar ice has sluiced you

  together again. Is there something real

  on the other side of “real” when the dream

  fails to exceed or cancel itself? His gingerbread

  hand clings eternally to yours as you tilt

  and slide away from heartbeats, from breath

  on the window pane, from proof and cunning—yet

  you manage somehow to stay alive

  in the same way the mind

  abandons its corner to stand its head up,

  allowing its dream worlds to glisten as particulate

  vanishings. Still, the you of “you”

  puts nothing aside or behind as it

  enters the red core of the amulet

  whose protective attributes

  sustain the no-such-thing-as-dream,

  the no-such-thing-as-awake. The mind

  lays its head down, puts its hands

  in its sleep-pockets, turns the day over like

  a fried egg, saunters off into the sunrise,

  into the vast on and on, whistling

  like a day laborer.

  STOLEN DRESS

  I was walking through a vast darkness

  in a dress studded with diamonds, the cloth

  under them like chainmail—metallic,

  form fitting like the sea to its horizon. I could

  hear waves breaking on the shore and far off

  concertina music drifting over the dunes. What

  was I doing in high heels in sand in a diamond-studded

  dress that had to be stolen? Fear washed

  through me, as if one of those waves had

  risen up and, against all the rules of waves,

  splashed me from the shoulders

  down. I was wet with diamonds and fear.

  A small boat held offshore with its cold

  yellow light pointing a long watery finger at me

  while the stolen feeling of the dress sparkled

  my location out into the universe. Thief! Thief!

  came an interplanetary cry, causing me to

  gaze up into the star-brilliant firmament,

  for it wasn’t just a sky anymore. It had

  taken on biblical stature. How had I

  gotten into this dress, these unruly

  waves, this queasy feeling I would be

  found out? Time to run! my heart said,

  pumping away under its brocade

  of diamonds. Strange vacancies had

  accumulated after all my sleep-plundered

  nights. Thief! came the cry again, as if

  I should recognize myself. And I did.

  I flung those high heels into the depths,

  took up my newfound identity, and without

  the least remorse, began to run those diamonds

  right out of this world.

  GLASS IMPRESSES

  most as it breaks. Look

  how placidly it held our milk

  in childhood as we sucked on the universe,

  missing our first breasts. The wine glass

  accidently dashed to

  the floor is instantly replaced

  with another—the party must go on!

  Someone a little drunk

  swept it up, but next morning

  a shark’s tooth glinted

  its half-smile from under

  the refrigerator skirting. Thank

  goodness no one wanted

  ice cream in the barefoot

  night. Little glass of my dreams—half

  full, half empty—dream-glass—

  I’m filling you to the top

  with Russian vodka drinkers.

  Let’s see how long you’ll hold out

  against their heedless elbows, their

  desperate wounding of the inevitable. If

  I break myself open to one more day,

  am I not more glass to last night’s sleep

  for how my dreams shine through me,

  sweeping me up, then dashing me

  with impeccable impunity?

  Broken? No, shattered! Loan me

  a shard of tomorrow, or give

  what is spilling me its freedom-tongue

  so that in the Meadow of the Dead

  there will be no blade of grass

  that doesn’t call to the passing lovers

  to lie down and try out their broken songs

  above the bones, below the shadows

  of the clouds.

  HUMMINGBIRD-MIND

  Flit, a useful word,

  allowing one in, yet escape

  from presence. If mind is

  at least hinge

  to body, its jade lantern

  gives dart and hover

  their difference—an arm

  that wishes it were

  a wing, air displaced

  by a finger-length

  of wit. We do not so much as argue

  with the never-was as slip

  its noose. Suck down

  two-thirds of your body

  weight in nectar and by nightfall

  you are no heavier than a star

  to anyone’s gaze. A lantern

  communing with the dark

  takes memory to another level

  and even when lifted high

  cannot bother to care

  it does not illumine

  an ocean with its

  flotilla of shore-prone boats.

  ONE DEER AT DUSK

  The hummingbirds are still

  fumbling the feeder with

  occasional dive-bombing

  to show each other how easy it is

  to slip a tongue into sweetness

  while others fight for

  priorities—who sips first or

  longest, or who can sit

  pensive without sipping

  at all. They know less

  about deer, their

  magnetic noses trained

  to the young red tips of

  roses. Yet tongue-sheath

  beaks would challenge

  fiercely if they caught deer

  mawing the blossoms

  of their honeysuckle.

  The stealth-step of the deer

  seems wishing not to tear

  the fabric of this easing down

  of night, shadow entering

  shadow. And dusk, which allows

  us to gaze across the boundary

  of night’s oncoming dream of

  possessing us entirely, has enabled

  the deer, in its shuttlecock moment,

  to let us watch ourselves

  as a soft muzzle

  caress and take teeth

  to what we’ve never tasted,

  then be ourselves

  consumed, as if night’s unsheathed

  all-over talisman of where we came from

  had entered us while a deer

  and hummingbirds occupied

  what must have been

  the night-nest of one mind

&n
bsp; choosing not to close

  until each step of the barely visible deer

  has blended with the last whir

  of hummingbird, vanished.

  iii

  I hate Batyushkov’s arrogance:

  “What’s the time?” they asked him

  once. He answered, “Eternity.”

  OSIP MANDELSTAM

  CORRECTION

  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”—spoken with his

  ’50s 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.

  for my father, Leslie Bond

  SULLY

  It hurts me to think of you

  under the ground.

  JAIME SABINES

  My view of you is always aerial

  like time to a child who surrounds

  everything with promise. I’m above

  you like a ceiling fan and you—laid out

  as my father described you—on the only flat

  surface in the house, the kitchen table—like

  a banquet to which everyone is invited

  but to which no one can sit

  down. For the record, my father told us

  your death as if it were the heaviest

  grief of his young life. He’d been away working

  in the Iowa coal mines, then come home on a whim

  to the Oklahoma farm where you lived,

  taking care of the youngest children. Sully,

  a half-sister, that demotion—your mother dead, your father’s

  bride sending child after child

  toward your protecting hands. “She did everything

  for us,” my father told us, so I saw she was their

  de facto mother. She wouldn’t have known

  her half-relation status as anything but

  bounty—her future already lodged

  in her—that she would have no children.

  So I hover above you, Sully,

  one of my long undeclared loves, because

  my father declared you in his quiet account

  of having walked toward that house surrounded

  by cars, the question weighing on him

  as he approached: what’s happened? Through

  the door then (and now his children

  with him in his telling), your black hair

  as in a García Lorca play, rayed out

  on the white pillow. He tells us

  of your coward lover, who took you

  to the quack doctor with this result. How it

  quenched my child heart to suffer your

  death like that. Did you guess your story

  would pass to anyone as words in air,

  you who were bound in the amber of your

  will to help everyone around you, not

  extending yourself more truly than that? If

  a poem could kiss dead eyes awake, you’d

  come back to me here in the house my father

  built, thousands of miles from where you

  were buried. And because time is both fire

  and star, you’d open yourself like a music box

  given to a child for nothing but delight. You’d

  tell me how it is in the round of time,

  to live outside it all in the beauty and sadness

  your name carries when I remember

  it in my father’s voice each time he brought you

  back to us. Sully. His soft saying of it—so you

  are alive and dead at once—you whom

  the world tried to squander, but failed

  in just this dimension: that if I were to say

  your name aloud in this solitary room

  where my father’s hammer, its exact singing,

  steel to steel, came down

  on every board, some air of you

  might wake from the dead and speak.

  RETROACTIVE FATHER

  He didn’t get the father he

  wanted when he was

  a child. His father wasn’t even

  himself in those days. But

  later, when the son didn’t need

  him like a child needs a father,

  his father became the good

  father. But it would never be,

  man-to-man, what the son had

  deserved, he felt, when he

  should have had that good

  father, back then. The son

  was like a bank and his

  memory was floor to ceiling

  money. He liked to go over

  with his good father all

  those failed back-there-times

  and watch the blue stain of

  that lost past creep from

  his father’s fingertips to his

  palms. He’d change the dye

  packs from blue to purple

  sometimes, but blue told

  a better story. It was a kind

  of solvency, don’t you

  see. The son accumulated

  his father’s debt, and even with

  regret that debt could never

  be paid off—just a father

  running through all time

  with blue hands and a son

  piteously calculating his

  loss. The father did not last

  as long as many fathers. But

  before he died he made sure

  his son heard from his own lips

  all his present and his back-there

  missing-love. It should have been

  enough, anyone would think. Still

  the son walked through life

  like stolen money ever after,

  while his bad-good father

  dug that child up again and again,

  even from the grave. That story

  could have no other ending.

  Blue father. Blue son.

  EARTH

  Those dogs chuffing down black dirt

  at the end of the driveway,

  seeming to grin with delicious

  intake—I knew earth wasn’t

  what it seemed. Envious, I could get down

  on my knees and join their feast. Tails

  wave, one paws the ground open

  for the other.

  The display ends as suddenly as it

  began. They’re off, lifted legs

  marking territory. Some dogs

  are only human. Yet what they did

  there with th
eir teeth and mouths stays

  with me through the day. I see them as I can’t

  see myself, finding what they need

  just under the surface—

  digging for it, eagerly, letting me

  wonder at sufficiency,

  at certain insatiable hungers.

  Needing a few bites of earth

  to settle us out.

  THE SEEMINGLY DOMESTICATED

  cat, preens all morning

  like a ballerina, caressing

  its white underbelly, stretching

  a hind leg into impossible

  contortions, then positions

  itself near the window overlooking

  the birdfeeder, there to hone its

  quickness to deadly ends. The door

  left ajar invites it to drop its

  maw of death over the greenfinch.

  What it could not expect was

  interception. Surprise

  startles open its mouth just

  that fraction needed for escape. Can

  it be called a miracle to see a bird fly

  from the teeth of its near

  death? Skyward with ragged

  desperation it gives

  back more sky than it left.

  The cat, its nature reasserted, takes up

  its accustomed perch before

  the fire on a side cushion,

  reassuming its former kindly

  aspect. But in the mind

  of the room something free

  and glad goes careening and

  will not settle. Something

  to do with hope, with plunder.

  Wing beats coinciding

  with shouts to fly! fly! Language itself

  inhabiting the moment

  with uplift.

  REACHING

  Eyes, mouth, hands—you’ve left me equipped

  in your portrait Green-Eyed Poet with essentials, all

  for moving outward, to touch, to open

  what may be touched and opened. The eyes

  open other eyes, have opened

  hearts, hundreds of books, have met

  the stolid searching eyes of the doe

  in the orchard beside her fawn, teaching it to run

  or stay. Fifty-three years we’ve shared

  art and lives, with and without Ray,

  whose ring of marriage is on my finger

  yet. As is your right, you’ve turned the lapis

  of his love-ring from blue

  to green, to match my eyes, yet

  exceeding them in that early spring promise-green.

  The lips parted to the eternal “would-speak” or

  “about-to-speak” or “have-spoken,” the past

  edging out future. The hands nest the head,

  cradle the chin, anchoring the flower