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Dream Doughnuts

I tell them how I read Ray’s

book of poems cover to cover until he entered

my dream as through some side-door in the jazz club,

some loophole in time.

I’m so glad to see you again, I say.

He’s carrying a bag of powdered doughnuts

and two paper cups of black coffee.

Was I gone too long? he asks, fresh from the bakery.

Too long is if you don’t come back at all, I say.

Time is funny, he says, biting into the doughnut

so the hole breaks open to the entire air supply

of the planet. Powdered sugar clings to the corners

of his lips. Ghost-lips I call him, as he

tears off doughnut and feeds it to me like a small bird

who won’t eat any other way. Time,

like the doughnut hole, has rejoined itself,

as when joining breaks us open to ourselves, corollary

to again.

I say to Ray:

Did you ever think

it would be like this?

Drink your coffee, he says, while it’s hot.

For a while we’re all out there together, but soon

I know I’ll have to go back to that alcove

in which we’re always waiting to see

each other again, the one we call Life, so it has

a hole in the middle, a sign of arrival, given

so we don’t need to miss ourselves or anyone else,

we’re sure that the whole,

in some unaccountable lightning-flash-hyphenation,

goes on and on, as it takes

our very breath away.

-Tess Gallagher from Dear Ghosts

#dream doughnuts #dear ghosts #tess gallagher #raymond carver #grief #poetry

Poetry

Explores loss, cancer, and death

Favorite poems: "My Unopened Life," "Lady Betty," "Apparition," "Dream Doughnuts," "Dear Ghosts,," "Old Spot," and "Sixteenth Anniversary"

#poignant and intense but not necessarily all sad #i don't super know how i feel about the women of auschwitz poem hmmm #2023 reads #books #dear ghosts #tess gallagher #lulu speaks #lulu reads #poetry #lulu reads dear ghosts

Now we know why the old women are lighting candles in the dark alcove of the church, kindling a wavering city of light, white candle burning next to white candle. Maybe that’s the trace hope leaves when it’s emptied out by crude events--reduced to a sign, a silent cry made of light.

from “Across the Border,” Tess Gallagher, in Dear Ghosts

#Tess Gallagher #dear ghosts

Tess Gallagher, Dear Ghosts

#tess gallagher #dear ghosts #poetry #poets

Tess Gallagher, Dear Ghosts

#tess gallagher #dear ghosts #poetry #poets #wang duanshu #daughters of emptiness

Not a Sparrow Just when I think the Buddhists are wrong and life is not mostly suffering, I find a dead finch near the feeder. How sullen, how free of regret, this death that sinks worlds. I bury her near the bicycle shed and return to care for my aged mother, whose suffering is such oxygen we do not consider it, meaning life at any point exceeds the price. A little more. A little more. That same afternoon, having restored balance, I discover a junco fallen on its back, beak to air, rain pelting the prospect. Does my feeder tempt flight through windows? And, despite evidence, do some accomplish it? Digging a hole for the second bird, I find the first gone. If I don’t think "raccoons" or "dogs," I can have a quiet, unwitnessed miracle. Not a feather remains. In goes the junco. I swipe earth over it, set a pot on top. Time to admit the limitations of death as admonition. Still, two dead birds in an afternoon lets strange sky into the mind: birds flying through windows, flying through earth. Suffering must be like that too: equipped with inexplicable escapes where the mind watches the hand level dirt over the emptied grave and, overpowered by the idea of wings, keeps right on flying

Tess Gallagher, “Not a Sparrow”, from Dear Ghosts

#tess gallagher #dear ghosts #not a sparrow #poetry #poem

27 february 2015

So we are each lit briefly by engulfments of space like the worm in the beak of the bird, yielding to sudden corridors of light-into-light, never asking: why, Tell me why after all this time all this light? K

#quote #light #life #tess Gallagher #dear ghosts