Blue Hour (2 page)

The doors of the coal chutes open. It is the grave of
Svoboda.
A night paved with news reports, the sky breaking that the world could be otherwise.

One does not forget stones versus tanks. When our very existence broadcast an appeal. Shall not say
adieu
when a country ceases to be.

A little later, a burial on a hillside in a pine box.

The empty flesh like stone beneath my hands—

A field lifted into a train window.

Under the ice, hay flowers, anne’s lace and lupines. My father digging through snow in a fatigue no sleep could relieve.

And the first love, sequestered in an attic room until spring.

We row to the middle of the lake in a guideboat a century old, water pewter in a coming-storm light, a diminishing signature of smoke from one of the cabins.

Will his life open to hers, she asks, now that she has traveled all the way to the edge of herself?

At night we sleep under blankets also a century old, beside cold stoves forged at Horseshoe, again a hundred years.

At late day the lake stills, and the hills on the far shore round themselves in the water.

We climb over rock moss and lichen, through fern stands and up the rain-slicked trail to the peak.

No longer could she live alone. As if dead, looking into a mirror with no face.

Star-spangle, woodsia, walking leaf, the ghosts of great blue heron.

What one of us lives through, each must, so that this, of which we are part, will know itself.

Here, where there was almost nothing, we waited in the birch-lit clouds, holding the uncertain hand of a lost spirit.

When my son was an infant we woke for his early feeding at
l’heure bleue
—cerulean, gentian, hyacinth, delft,
jouvence.
What were also the milk hours.

This one who had come toward me all my life now gazed at the skies above Montparnasse as if someone were there, gesturing to him from the slate light.

He looked at me and the asylum shimmered, assembled again into brick-light and wards of madness. Emptiness left my mother. The first love in field upon field.

The dolls were dolls, the curtain a curtain. The one in the grave said yes.
Adieu,
country.
Adieu,
Franco-Prussian War.

for Sean

The curfew was as long as anyone could remember

Certainty’s tent was pulled from its little stakes

It was better not to speak any language

There was a man cloaked in doves, there was chandelier music

The city, translucent, shattered but did not disappear

Between the no-longer and the still-to-come

The child asked if the bones in the wall

Belonged to the lights in the tunnel

Yes, I said, and the stars nailed shut his heaven

protected from the silence she slid she too into this loss of self that reaches its height

and is reversed in a clump of charred roses

—Jacques Dupin

an elegy

What happened? His face was visible then not. Around him snow fell, but over him grass remained, wet and young and shaped like a coffin.

I laid her in the snow, she who I was, and walked away.

And the house?
Shuttered against fog, awake, windblown.

“The children had cocoa for breakfast, and milk with bread and jam at lunch. They took naps in the afternoon. They had a dog. At the end of the winter there was ‘no more snow.’”

And the cries were those of gulls following a seed plough.

The people of this world are moving into the next, and with them their hours and the ink of their ability to make thought.

Particles of light have taken from them
antiphon, asylum, balefire, benediction.

Snow fell onto her coat and chewen gloves, at night like apple blossoms in tar, and my solace became that she would remain as she was.

When the house was alive, its walls recorded the rising and falling of the bed, as if a wind—

The hurrying-forth took with it
casement, casque, chalice.

So why does it matter
how,
precisely? Behind a curtain in late day with a length of rope. In one of the upper rooms, where a cold rose even when the house was shuttered.

His mother on the porch, dressing like a man even then, and the house in the photograph behind her in flames, mother and house.

Beneath the ice, open-eyed but absent, she who I was, with ribbon scars faint across her. Every tip of wheat-stalk lit by sun.

They took with them
communicant, cruet,
and the ability to keep watch. Having lit the night sky, their heaven vanished.

He needed to feel as if he were going to die, many times to feel it, many hundreds of times.

It came along and passed beyond. Had I been. Were you not. Because I believed I was alone.

Until the derelict house offered its last apparition.

As a star plummets from darkness, a soul is exiled. Light, silk, the rope, black storms of dream.

That one day he was given a new mother, and it was she who starved them, she who sent them into the wood to cut the very switch—

So with the rope, as if he could replace the past. A child awakened by a whip. Until his narrow coffin and cup of sleep.

He was only a boy when the world darkened. But the switches were easy to find, so red in winter.

The house where one could dance without clothes imagined an invisible piano, stove mice, chimney swallows, a curtain, a cry.

What may have been the beginning of life after death.

In the open arms of a burnt wind he returned to me, barefoot by choice, bearing gingerbread, chocolate, quince jam, a bag of candy.

Look! Whole villages intact and shimmering. The very body itself begins to evanesce, it has not true boundary. Death changes it as a mirror changes a face.

Then he used the past to refer to the present.
Flour-sacks, school-chalk, a coherent life.

Wings slap along the wall, and in the hardened owl dung, crickets glint. Dust settles on the house until entire sentences are written.

A window haunted by an open hand.
Here,
he said, his voice like gauze like grieving.

Over the writing table, an empty map: years to connect the little marks. In his closet among the linens his weapon of choice.

In answer to your question, no, he could not have done it. The rope was used for something else, worn from use, a cry a stiffening.

It was with this he untied himself again and again, in the bed and before the fire, blue-voiced and changed of face.

The house saw everything as does every house. Hollow walls, staircase, sorrowing ink. It was the last time.

They had been children in towns years apart, she who I was, and the man in the coroner’s arms.