I post this because I ran into it while researching Tess Gallagher, the poetry teacher of Alice Sebold (author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky), the one she turned to at the time of her rape for some support.
In my first reading of it (because I read it three times in a span of minutes), I started to cry. "Silly to ask now if the hair/ she put on the altar, imagining her power over/ his passage, was dead or living."
Silly indeed. How does one measure loss? The same way one measures love, I guess.
Most of the poets I read have been, in some way, influenced by Buddhism. For what is poetry without meditation? The most striking insights that can find its frame only in fragments of words are prayer-songs or, in my own assessment, poems.
Black Valentine
by Tess Gallagher
I run the comb through his lush hair,
letting it think into my wrist
the way the wrist whispers to the cards
with punctuation and savvy in a game of solitaire.
So much not to be said the scissors
are saying in the hasp and sheer
of the morning. Eleven years I’ve cut
his hair and even now, this last time, we hide
fear to save pleasure
as bulwark. My dearest—the hair says as it brushes my
thighs—my only—on the way to the floor. If the hair
is a soul-sign, the soul obeys our gravity, piles up
in animal mounds and worships the feet. We’re
silent so peace rays over us like Bernice’s hair
shaken out across the heavens. If there were gods
we are to believe they animated her shorn locks
with more darkness than light, and harm
was put by after the Syrian campaign, and
harm was put by as you tipped the cards
from the table like a child bored
with losing. I spread my hair like a tent over us
to make safety wear its twin heads, one to face death,
the other blasted so piteously by love
you throw the lantern of the moment against
the wall and take me in with our old joke, the one
that marks my northern skies, “Hey, babe,” you say
like a man who knows how to live on earth. “Hey,”
with your arm around my hips, “what you doing
after work?” Silly to ask now if the hair
she put on the altar, imagining her power over
his passage, was dead or living.
Image of Tess Gallagher from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177702
Posts
