Blue Hour

by Carolyn Forche

  dreaming nouns remembered until a window

  dressed in their shrouds

  drinking from cupped hands

  dwelling in apartness

  each a ring of soot

  each day breaking along the cordillera, then broken

  each page a window intact until touched

  early summer’s green plums

  earth singing in her magma chambers

  easter lilies opening in

  elegiac time

  empty windows dipped in milk

  enigma, escritoire, estuary

  enough seen. enough had. enough

  even if by forgetting

  even if he is thousands of miles away or dead

  even the trembling of souls turning into light

  every line in his face the river of a single year

  except to be gentle with one who loved you mistakenly and very much

  expectation, the presence of the not-yet-exiled from itself

  filled with lifelong gratitude

  fire of human becoming

  fired from the tip of the only possible

  fireflies above the graves, time collapsing, your name which should not have been in stone in stone

  firing into the air five nights in the shelter

  firmament, fissure, flare stars, frottage

  flags opening in wind

  flatbread like a stack of plates on his arm

  flocks of geese marching in formation down a dust road

  flowering trees: trumpet, bottlebrush, cassia, frangipani, flame, sea grape

  flowers rotting on mounds: air plant, allamanda, amaryllis, spider lily, bougainvillea, shellflower, hibiscus, ashanti blood, trumpet vines, oleander

  for the rest of your life, search for them

  for the words that would not come

  forward to a rope from his arm to the post

  forward to a wedding-cake knife in our hands

  forward to the blindfold

  forward to the list of demands

  fountains of dust rising out of the hills

  fragments from the Second Brandenburg

  fresh wind in the linens

  from a gloved hand a flaming bottle

  from chance to chance, event to event

  from earth to satellite, event to event

  from our last train ride through the ricefields

  from the cathedral comes Kyrie

  garbage fires along the picket lines

  gasoline coupons and rations, an event no longer remote

  Georg leaning against the winter pine eating a sparrow

  ghost hands appearing in windows, rubbing them clear

  ghost swift, grisaille, guardian spirit

  God not a being but a force, and humans, the probative tip of that becoming

  God withdrawn from the world

  gourds, relief sacks loaded into trucks, poles, rags, tents

  graves marked with scrap iron, a world in her dead eye

  grief of leave-taking

  ground fog rising from a graveyard

  had gathered to die

  had it changed?

  had undergone subtle and perilous shiftings

  half-tracks and yellow-eyed transports, and behind them a long road

  happens when you say yes

  happiness without fulfillment

  having made herself stand she was at rest

  hayloft, hillock, hoarfrost, hush

  he is from exile, which is in all of them

  he listened to Schubert, Tosca

  he saw nothing of what was to come

  he told her how, in those years

  he, though alive, was no longer

  her amnesia an approach to understanding her life

  her face the war years

  her hair a banner of rain

  her hands blue in the well

  her wet skirt wrapping her legs

  hills thinning at the world’s edge

  his absence fills with passing clouds, the script of birds, and schoolchildren’s voices

  his ashen hands having passed through the window of his truck

  his can of dark tobacco, his yellow finch in a cage

  his footsteps disappearing as he walked

  his grave strewn with slipper flowers and sardine cans

  his hands, detritus reaching through a window washed away

  his words sparkling in the raw air

  history branded with the mark of uncertainty

  history decaying

  history decaying into images

  horse clearing an obstacle

  horses, poppies, trees with trunks like sycamores and leaves like maples

  hot, the hurry of stars

  hour of no matins

  house of being

  how abandoned how left behind

  how better to account for my life

  how did this happen? how it always happens.

  how it reads its past

  how secretly you died for years, on behalf of all who wished for themselves a private death

  how the soul becomes an inhabitant of flesh

  I am alone, so there are four of us

  I am here, blowing into my hands, you are in the other coffin

  I can’t possibly get away, she said

  I lit a taper in the Cathédrale St-Just, a two-franc candle, birds flying in the dome

  I remember standing next to his bed

  I see myself in their brass coat-buttons but not in their eyes

  I stand on the commode for a glimpse of it

  I tried once. it was just before the war, and she had no time for me. I can’t possibly get away

  I was to bring him music for the left hand

  idam agnaye, na mama

  idam agnaye, na mama (this is for the fire, not for me)

  if he exists to another, that is need

  if rope were writing he would have hanged himself

  if you ask him what happened he will tell you

  if you bring forth what is within you

  in a bowl polished by the morning light

  in a village where the women know how to piss standing up

  in carceral silence

  in glimpses, broken messages, cryptic signs

  in his address book, a pressed poppy chosen from his mother’s poppy bed

  in his coat, a small cage of canaries

  in his hand a clod of himself to wipe on the walls

  in memory: the music of an open spigot

  in reverse until you were floating in a flat green boat

  in solitary reverie we can tell ourselves everything

  in stone is written in stone

  in the bardo of becoming

  in the black daybreak, passing through

  in the casket window, a face

  in the cellar, three crates: rifles, gold & cognac

  in the cesium fields

  in the chaotic light in the coal-smoked heavens

  in the cities of what can be said

  in the country of advanced years

  in the ecstasy of standing outside oneself

  in the fact of parting

  in the garden: heliotrope, phlox, rose trees, trellised roses, blue torenia, hibiscus, blue lobelia, lichen, a bamboo grove

  in the garden in winter with my son

  in the mathematical language of a time to come

  in the morning, a white shirt on the line waving

  in the night photograph: electric cities, burning forests

  in the pole-and-rag tents

  in the still-bandaged pines

  in the summer, weeds took over the city: horse weeds known as railway weeds grew taller than people

  in the surround of that word

  in the time after

  in the tin lamp’s punched light

  in the toy store, a parcel of toys explodes

  in the white infinity of mist

  in the window a veil of winter

  in their radiance
a tub of dry milk

  in this camp, how many refugees

  in this the child’s blue hour

  in thought, where they were lost

  incapable of imagining annihilation

  inhabiting a body to be abolished

  inter alia, inter nos

  intercessor

  into a duration deep within her

  into the world, further illuminated by thought

  iris, illuminant

  is there anything else?

  it appears to be an elegy, put into the mouth of a corpse

  it became what it was because of us—in that sense loved

  it is as if space were touching itself through us

  it is more ominous than any oblivion, to see the world as it is

  it is not possible to find you in death’s heaven

  it is not raining in the catacombs

  it is not you who will speak

  it is the during of the world

  it is the morning of the body’s empty soul

  it is worse than memory

  it ruins time, the chiasmus of hope

  it was all over

  it was all there, written in stone, a record of munitions

  it was cinema

  it was gruel refused: blue wedges of bread, maggot soup, rice drippings

  it was just before the second war, and she had no time for me

  it was raining in the catacombs

  it was the first time in my life I tasted fish

  it was the name of a time, and over there, a place

  it was the simplest way to know one another

  J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi

  J’ai tellement marché tellement parlé

  journey of two thousand kilometers

  journey that will have no end

  keeping a record of oneself

  keepsake, knell, Kyrie

  knowing oneself from within

  l’heure bleue, hour of doorsteps lit by milk

  le musée hypothétique

  lace patterned after frost flowers

  language from chance to chance

  languid at the edge of the sea

  lays itself open to immensity

  leaf-cutter ants bearing yellow trumpet flowers along the road

  left everything left all usual worlds behind

  library, lilac, linens, litany

  lifting the wounded

  light and the reverse of light

  light impaled on the peaks

  light issuing from the wind’s open wounds

  light mottling the forest floor, crows leaving one limb for another

  light of cinder blocks, meal trays

  light of inexhaustible light

  lighted paper sacks sent downriver to console

  like the handkerchief road

  like the whispering in a convent garden

  like tomb flowers, the ossuary’s skull works

  lilac and globeflower, clouds islanding the tilled fields

  linked as flame to burning coal, as one candle lighted from another

  listening to the stove mice and chimney swallows

  little rain holes where the bullets went, rains crater the field, raising each a ring of soot, striking the catch pails and stabbing the tarpaulin.

  we live in fog tents, awake, whispering what could once be written on a sliver of rice

  lost in paper, shellfire

  lupine wind, lingering daylight

  lute music written for severed hands

  manuscripts in the cold part of the house

  matchbooks flaring in a blank window

  matinal, mirage, mosaic

  meaning did not survive that loss of sequence

  memory does not interfere

  memory the presence of the no-more

  metal soup pots hung to dry, crazed porcelain basins

  mirrors, vials, furnaces

  misprision of moments lifted from their concealment

  moments of rain ascend in the manner of smoke

  more ominous than any oblivion

  mortar smoke mistaken for an orchard of flowering pears

  mud from the bowels of the city

  mud from the disheveled night

  music loosening floor tiles, a moon washed in earthly light, the dawn sirens calling men to the mines

  music of the hurrying fountains

  must release the dead from bondage

  must rise from the dead while we live

  my dear, I think yes

  my father crossed the field and stood

  my hair a cold flag of rain

  my hands coated with tomb dust

  my mother’s hand broken by a fierce wind

  my own: I was utterly there. and when I came back I was still there

  naked beneath our names, thrown up by the wit-lost

  near dawn, near the river wasn’t it? if one of us

  near the lake, where the fireweed was

  neither a soul nor a body

  neither for us nor near itself

  never repeating itself

  nevertheless, noumenon, november

  new pasts, whole aeons are invented

  night shift in the home for convalescents

  nightshirt, razor strop, boot-heel

  night-voiced viola

  no breath of God, no words, and no possibility of restoration

  no content may be secured from them

  no one prayer resembling another

  not a house but a stagnant hour

  not blood, flesh and bread but an earthly ecstasy

  not isolation but a lack of solitude

  not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest

  not wishing to know anything more about oneself

  nothing as it was

  nothing other than mind

  nothing was exiled from itself

  now and again like a voice grown suddenly tired

  now on the plane in a white-out

  objects [heavenly bodies] as they were in the past

  oder nicht

  oil soap, orchard, ossuary

  old books snowing from our hands

  older than clocks and porcelain, younger than rope

  older than glass, younger than music

  on each tip of grass a wet jewel

  on her hand, a moment of ring-light

  on lave les corps, on les prépare pour l’ensevelissement

  on the blanket then, government issue

  on the fifty-fourth day, loss of sight and hearing

  on the platform between trains, holding a bottle

  on the shortwave, the high whine of the world’s signal

  one for the other

  one sees and is seen

  one sees and is seen approaching the other with empty hands

  one stands in line for butter

  only the walls that did not face the blast remained white

  open shell of heaven

  or a failed letter

  or that she would admonish me for the years of my silence

  or when it first occurred to them to have graves with markers

  our atelier of passing trains, citronella smoke, a veiled bed

  our hymnic song against death

  our most secret selves

  past and present sliding into each other

  pear trees espaliered along the walls

  pen and ink across the boundaries

  pink snow downwind of the test site

  pinning their intentions to a saint’s dress

  pitch smoke chalks the sky over the roof

  poppy seed, portal, portrait, prayerbook

  present though most often invisible

  question after question

  quiescent, quiet, quinine, quivering

  rain falling into their open eyes

  rain in the catacombs

  raising each a ring of soot

  redemption not an accounting or a debt

  refugee, relic, reverie

/>   relief sacks loaded into trucks

  relief tents until the horizon

  remaining in fear of death but remaining

  responsible beyond our intentions

  resting language or language under surveillance

  reverses itself as we read it

  riddles the statues of martyrs and turns

  rinses limbs then craters the field

  rinses limbs then

  rises as wet smoke

  rising in bodily light

  roads rivered with waste and a tea-colored rain

  sacks of soy and manioc, dry milk, rice

  sanctuary, sea glass, sorrow

  scoop of earth: slivers of femur, metacarpals

  searching for something one knows will not be found

  set in language and deserted by God

  she heard no one’s footsteps, then nothing

  she holds lilacs to her face

  she meets a man on the mule-steps who has been dead for months

  she pulled the lilacs to herself

  she puts the rice pot down in the snow

  she sees nothing of what is to come

  she went with him willingly and without knowing where she was, she saw the country very much as she would have had she walked through a film about herself

  she within me

  she would never again wander too far into the past

  sheltering in the open

  shore birds, smoke, the ferris wheel turning

  signature by signature in triplicate, rice and dry milk

  since last night on the bridge

  six hours under fire along the road

  six inches from my belly

  sixteen clicks after the flag of fire

  slow questioners, there was no place in the world for them

  smacking the hands of children who miswrote

  small talk like white smoke from kindling

  snow clicking as it falls into itself, hushed, a little smoke crawling from a stovepipe, following the wind or rising straight, the village so quiet that one can hear the iced branches

  snow in the shadow folds, impasto, gouache

  snow on the shoulders of the statuary

  so as not to take a single word into my mouth

  so as to be taken for refugees

  so emptiness cannot harm emptiness

  so it appears as if it were what we wanted

  so that the dead climb up out of the river to blacken its banks

  so that the other comes back

  so this is how the past begins—

  so we walked, pretending our empty suitcases burdened us

  some dance, one holds a dove aloft

  some flaw in the message itself

  some were burned with cigarettes, some doused with turpentine. every night they poured turpentine through their hair and slept like that, so as to keep the leeches from giving them head wounds

  some with wicker baskets, others with gathered flax, some with children in their arms, others with brooms, some dance, others hold aloft a dove someone will be pouring milk while another perishes