Is, Is Not

by Tess Gallagher

  Suddenly I felt: no wonder I immediately formed such an intuitive connection to the place to which my love would come to rest! It was as if my 1974 consciousness already knew, in some uncanny future time roundness, that Josie was there in life and death, attached to that as yet unlived space and time. In other words: I had the import, the feeling of consequence, before I had the narrative, the linear here-to-there of what would happen.

  I begin to think I am sometimes trying to catch up to what has happened in a time that hasn’t happened yet. I am not so special in this capacity to sense a field of poetic life-abundance in places and people and circumstances. What may be special is a kind of heedless daring that trusts feelings of deep meaning emanating from a place. I take the chance that my being there has the import I feel, and I make it my life.

  Just as Monet designed and grew his water-lily ponds for his paintings, I bought my cottage in Ireland eleven years ago and flew four times a year to be there with Josie. The difference between Monet’s way and mine was that I just allowed the elements in that place to draw near, to inhabit me, if you will. I had no map or plan, only to be in that place as authentically as I could.

  I set about knowing my neighbors, being involved with Josie’s extended Gray clan, meeting painters such as Sean McSweeney and Barrie Cooke, area poets Dermot Healey and Leland Bardwell. I also drew quite a lot on my time with musicians and poets from the Republic and Northern Ireland when I was in my late twenties and early thirties.

  Before I knew Josie, and while I stayed nights with his sister Eileen’s family while writing Under Stars, his niece, Yvonne McDonagh, who was twelve at the time, would bicycle down to my caravan to listen to me read aloud those poems. We became confidantes, talking of love and how one might recognize it. She ultimately trained and worked as a nurse in Dublin, but sadly for her and her loved ones, died young from cancer. Still, the round of her life allowed her to marry her true love by her last year.

  A story later came to me about Yvonne’s death, how her favorite uncle, Josie, had caught a brown trout from Lough Arrow, cooked it, and had it carried to the Dublin hospital where Yvonne lay, unable to eat. The story goes that she found that gift so magical and such a message from home that she ate the brown trout as her final meal.

  I had not met Josie at that time, but we were already bound to each other through Yvonne and a brown trout from Lough Arrow. Story must prepare the way for meaning to precede itself, to seem as if it had always been there waiting to be taken up.

  So, many years later when I met Josie, he already had a sense of legend, as if our meeting had been prepared for years before by his niece’s untimely death after one year of marriage. A tragedy. We were waiting for each other perhaps on opposite sides of a tragedy. And today in a graveyard where I knew no one in 1974, Yvonne and her mother, Eileen, rest not far from Josie, where I go often now to sing Josie’s and my favorite song: “If I Were a Blackbird.” The song is deep in traditional Irish music. It pierces time and carries us, living and dead, in the great round of our inner worlds, restoring us to each other outside linear notions of time and clearing away suppositions that would rob us of our innate capacities to belong to our futures before we even have them.

  The complexity of a poetry that seeks to deliver liminal space and time, that which occupies a stance at both sides of a boundary or threshold, has lifted me out of easy categories as a poet. I like Wall’s locating phrase for me as having “an edge-of-everything sensibility.” She posits further that if we go far enough, edging out and onward from the West, we end up in the East, that extension into the round.

  My poems’ ways of seeing do devolve from Eastern notions of reality. That is, they challenge dualities which tend to blot out a range of possibilities. Also, I adopt the Buddhist notion that each action we take bears importantly on the fabric of the whole, that the smallest creature, even a snail, has import—that all life is sacred and to be honored, that our path reveals itself according to our mindfulness of others and being able to see into the interconnectedness of choices.

  Daily meditations, taken from a lifetime of reading Buddhist thinkers and religious leaders, are helpful to opening my mind in un-programmatic ways. One book usually in my bag as I cross back and forth between Ireland and America is Openness Mind: Self-Knowledge and Inner Peace through Meditation. The book is defaced with passages underlined and circled. “Try to develop a feeling for the thoughts watching the watcher”; below this I’ve scribbled the title of a poem I wrote later, “Little Inside Outside Dream.” Or there is a question underlined in black ink: “But is there actually any ‘now’?”

  The seeming urgency of now makes it useful as a stimulus to actions which may, however, be shorn of important connections to before and after. When we consider now in the round of time, it is best experienced as a planet we are swiftly falling away from, but that we might re-encounter in a poem. Poems compress and expand time until the notion of now regains dimensionality. Such an idea of the “now” can have a past and future. It doesn’t have to navigate only in the present.

  Wall mentions ley lines of energy that are said to run through the very place in Ireland where I live, energy lines that are connected perhaps from Sligo’s sacred sites to places as far away as the pyramids. She introduces the Irish term dindsenchas. The word means “a totality of topography, history, ecology, animal life, non-human life, spirit beings, and human impact on a place—all the living and the dead in a non-linear simultaneity of presence.” This passage delighted me—to discover there was already an Irish word for this complex notion of existence with which I’d been quietly working. This beautiful word carries forth a kind of poetic version of Einstein’s relativity theory. It helps us stay in the round, in the deep mind I’d been drawn to in Ballindoon—for I had not stumbled upon it, but rather accepted its invitation.

  When I visited the Buddhist nun Jakucho Setouchi in Kyoto in 1989 after the death of my husband Raymond Carver, she took me into her temple where she gave her legendary talks to women thwarted in love. We had instant rapport as if we had always known each other. “Why am I here,” I suddenly asked at one point, feeling as if some strong, beguiling force was at work. She answered, “Because the spirits of this place have asked for you.”

  Since then I have applied that notion to my presence in the Northwest of Ireland: I am here because the spirits of this place have asked for me. The endeavor of my days and nights has been to see what they want with me. Their assignments are various—as simple as visiting Eileen Frazer, who gave me well water when I wrote Under Stars. I listen to her stories about the old days when a person entering your house would utter: “Lord give blessings on this house and all in it!” Eileen had been widowed with five children to raise alone only a year or two before we met. Her husband Jimmy, I would learn years later, had been the best friend of Josie. Now her grandson Oliver comes to my cottage to sing traditional Irish songs before the hearth—songs that connect me and my cottage to singers who’ve sung these songs for hundreds of years.

  Another tribute I was called to make to the spirits of this place Ballindoon is the collaborative book of oral stories I took down from Josie entitled Barnacle Soup. In doing so, I could hear about Irish characters I’d met when they were old, but that Josie had known in their youth—such as Tommy Flynn, a fiddle player, a wit, and a seanchaí. Now Josie rests just a few feet from Tommy’s gravesite, and I walk to them both in ten minutes from my cottage.

  In the strange web of things, I also discovered my cottage had been the home of the midwife who in fact had delivered Josie, a Mrs. Quinland. Last night I dreamed I was helping a pregnant woman out of bed and it felt as if I’d had a visit from Mrs. Quinland!

  A factor that joins my two Northwests is the dependability of rain in each. I yearn for it if I am deprived of it. My sensibility seems to need it as some painters crave the color blue. I also love gazing toward the west at sundown from my Sky House or Bay St. House in Port Angeles, for there is a wide sweep of s
ea between America and Canada. This sea view is always changing—one minute glassy, the next white-capped by wind. Cargo ships from China and Japan, cruise ships, and tug boats pass back and forth to Seattle or to the Pacific, and a ferryboat to Victoria, Canada, sails several times a day.

  There is indeed a sense of being on the edge, the edge of the Pacific Ocean, which sends the orca whales through our strait and salmon to spawn and die in rivers fished for hundreds of years by Native Americans.

  The spirits of the American Northwest pulled me into small fishing boats with my father on the ocean from the age of five. Fishing teaches patience and the unknown, the unseen. Light illuminates the mind on water and the motion of the boat is a lullaby. It is a natural state of meditation. Speech on deep water is changed and intimate. The mind drifts. Things of a trivial nature lift away. Life seems bared to essentials. When one is on the ocean, one feels in touch with sacred space and non-linear time, that wistfulness toward simultaneity of times and places.

  My childhood was spent in the logging camps where both my mother and father made our living, she as a choker-setter and he as a spar-tree-rigger. While my mother and father were felling trees, I was exploring with my brothers, building shelters, making trails, picking wild berries, tracking bear and deer. I was also always on the verge of getting lost in the greater forest.

  It was all perhaps a preparation for becoming a poet—surrounded by the unknown, daring to venture, to pass back and forth from the wild to the domestic of home and hearth, all the while watching the larger-than-life efforts of my parents as they risked their very lives to earn a living from the forest.

  Being with forests and oceans allows one “extremes of other-than-human domains.” Wall says these connections in my poetry offer “a radical form of empathy that is not simply local and not absently, abstractly global.”

  In these exchanges, passing back and forth between my two Northwests, I leave hummingbirds and eagles in Port Angeles for goldfinches, mute swans, and wild pheasants in Ballindoon. I leave deer, black bear, cougar, and bobcats on the Olympic Peninsula for badgers, foxes, and elegant stags with their regal racks of horns in the West of Ireland.

  I assume some cross-pollination of empathy and attentiveness must be taking place through bringing these disparate inhabitants together in one consciousness. In the process, and through my poems, I feel I am being transformed from the inside out.

  TESS GALLAGHER

  ABBEY COTTAGE AND SKY HOUSE

  NOTES

  Button, Button: This poem was written over a four-year span as part of a larger collaborative exchange of poems between Lawrence Matsuda in Seattle and me in the Northwest of Ireland. Because there are so many cross-cultural and political references, I offer the following notes:

  Green Peach: the first pseudonym Bashō took for his writing.

  The Famine Museum: at Strokestown Park, Strokestown, Co. Roscommon, Ireland. It is located in the original Stable Yards of Strokestown Park House. It was designed to commemorate the history of the famine of Ireland and in some way to balance the history of the “Big House.” The Great Irish Famine of the 1840s is now regarded as the single greatest social disaster of nineteenth-century Europe. Between 1845 and 1850, when blight devastated the potato crop in Ireland, in excess of two million people—almost one-quarter of the entire population—either died or emigrated. I visited the museum with my niece Rijl Barber and Josie’s daughter Siobhan Gray in 2016, and it made an indelible impression on me, how great the suffering of the Irish people has been.

  The National Anthem of Germany: composed by Joseph Haydn. This reference recalls the famously reported Anglo Irish Bank’s former manager’s singing “Deutschland Über Alles” in a taped phone conversation with former chief executive of the bank David Drumm in September 2008. The managers knew that the billion-euro aid package from the European Union would not be enough to save Irish banks after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. That’s why they swore about naive German savers who would ultimately foot the bill, before singing the first verse of the song “Deutschland Über Alles,” cynically making use of the German people’s propensity to save.

  Crisp bag: Here the reference is to the fact that women who became pregnant in Ireland before May 2018 and who sought an abortion for any reason (rape and incest were not reasons for abortion under the 2013 limited abortion law) had to travel to England to obtain one. They usually travelled by boat. Therefore, they had to find round-trip passage fee, accommodation in England prior to the procedure, plus money for the abortion and also aftercare. The woman in the poem is suffering this plight. That she is collecting money in a chip bag is an ironic indication of her desperation and humiliation.

  Limited Abortion Law: In Ireland the question of whether a woman threatening suicide, because she is pregnant, would be allowed an abortion was brought forward during the vote for the so-called “limited abortion law” which passed on July 12, 2013. Under this restrictive legislation, one doctor was required to sanction an abortion in the case of a medical emergency; two in cases where there is a physical threat to the life of the pregnant woman; and three—including either an obstetrician or gynecologist and two psychiatrists—where there may be a risk of suicide. By an overwhelming vote in May 2018, this amendment was overturned and a new bill approved which would allow abortion to the twelfth week.

  Savita Halappanavar: an immigrant from India to Ireland, died in University Hospital Galway on October 28, 2012, from multiple failures in treatment, but also because confusion over the anti-abortion law became a “material factor.” She had been hospitalized with an untenable pregnancy. However, under Irish law at the time, the life of an unborn fetus was to be sustained before the life of the mother. The baby’s heartbeat had to stop before it could be removed from her womb. Savita Halappanavar subsequently died of sepsis due to inattentiveness to her own care during this doomed pregnancy. There were worldwide protests in India, Great Britain, and Ireland. A full inquiry found that she had died as a result of what was ironically called “medical misadventure.” Her death became the stimulating factor in reconsideration of the effect of the anti-abortion law in Ireland. In fact, it has even been suggested that the May 2018 law that revised the 2013 law be called Savita’s Law. It allows abortion up to the twelfth week, with other considerations governing abortions after that period.

  Sun Ya Bar: famous bar located in the Seattle International District formerly attached to the Sun Ya Restaurant. Roger Shimomura, the famous Japanese American painter, frequented it and also occasionally other poets, writers, and artists. Mike Seeley gives a rich description of this Seattle landmark:

  At 4 on a Tuesday afternoon, the bar is half-full but pregnant with promise. Every patron is on the wrong side of 40, with blacks and whites peppered (or salted) among a mostly Asian crowd. Three television sets of varying sizes show Hurricane Isaac hitting Louisiana, Asian art adorns the walls, and red paper bulbs hang from the black tile ceiling, muting the lights. Against the back wall rest a wood stove and dartboard, both out of commission, and swivel chairs make for a potentially great bout of bumper drunks. The Bartender: Tall, dark-haired Gloria Ohashi boasts a deep voice and quick wit. A skinny regular comes in and hands her a small green pumpkin that he says he found on the bus. “We don’t have regulars,” says Ohashi. “We have lifers.” Seattle Weekly, Sept. 11, 2011, by Mike Seeley.

  “The Old Woman from Wexford”: (also known as “Eggs and Marrowbones”) is a traditional Irish folk song that, like so many old folk songs, has origins lost to history. It’s a humorous ballad, wherein an unfaithful old woman is taught a lesson when her blind husband steps aside and she plunges into the lake instead of her pushing him in, as was her design!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Ability to Hold Territory” appeared in The Plume Anthology of Poetry (Volume 6), February 28, 2018.

  “Almost Lost Moment” appeared in Plume, February 2018 online edition.

  “Ambition” was first published by the New Yorke
r, 2019.

  “Button, Button” first appeared in Boogie-Woogie Crisscross written in collaboration with Lawrence Matsuda, published April 2016 by MadHat Press.

  “Blind Dog/Seeing Girl” and “One Deer at Dusk” appeared in Mānoa, 2012.

  “Cloud-Path” was first published by the New Yorker, February 6, 2017. Also in Get Lit! 20th Anniversary Anthology.

  “Deer Path Enigma” appeared in Washington 129, an anthology of Washington State poetry, 2017, edited by Tod Marshall, Poet Laureate of Washington State.

  “Earth” was first published by the New Yorker, February 5, 2018.

  “Encounter” and “As the Diamond” appear in the anthology Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time, University of Nebraska Press, 2017, edited by Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall, and O. Alan Weltzien.

  “Hummingbird-Mind” appeared in Stony Thursday No. 16, Summer 2018, one of the longest-running literary journals in Ireland.

  “I Want to Be Loved Like Somebody’s Beloved Dog in America” appeared in Metamorphic: 21st Century Poets Respond to Ovid, edited by Nessa O’Mahony and Paul Munden, published by Recent Work Press, Canberra, 2017.

  “Oliver” appeared in Narrative Magazine online, Spring 2016.

  “One Deer at Dusk” appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Fall 2018.

  “Opening” and “Recognition” appeared in the Sun, 2018.

  “Reaching” appeared in Alfredo Arreguin’s World of Wonders, Cave Moon Press, 2018.

  “Stolen Dress” appeared in Poetry in 2019.

  “Three Stars” appeared in Plume, April 2018.

  “To an Irishman Painting in the Rain” appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Winter 2014.