Poets Online Archive

POETS ONLINE ARCHIVE
Evocation

Reading "The Kiss Takes Confession" by Tess Gallagher, I always think of her late husband, Raymond Carver. It's like the way I read the last two books by Donald Hall that are full of Jane Kenyon. The poems slide between joy in their shared lives and the sadness of the illness that took them. But even the poems that are not overtly about Carver and Kenyon are caught up in my mind with them. This is, of course, my own defect - one I must share with other readers - brought on by knowing something/too much about the poet's life.

How do we separate the poet from the poem? Reading poets we have never heard of is one way. Chop the author's name off the poems is another approach I have seen used. Still, I love knowing who they are and how they lived and why they wrote what they wrote.

If I imagine Ray Carver, dying of lung cancer and being cared-for by Tess in their Port Townsend house, and her sitting down to write this poem, it helps me. Maybe she wrote it before he was ill, or before they met, or after he died, or about someone else. It doesn't matter to me. But it helps me to approach the poem.

I like the kiss personified in this poem - the one perched on his knee. Nice personification. So different from the examples I recall from school of the wind crying and freedom calling.

I was going to use another poem called I Stop Writing the Poem for this prompt and in that one Ray is right there too in that big empty shirt.

Evocation. A good word. Could you try to evoke someone you knew who is no longer living through some object you might come across in an ordinary day? Perhaps it was theirs once, but that might be too easy. Could you also try to personify this object in some way?

Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington, where she now lives. Her books of poetry include Moon Crossing Bridge and Amplitude: New and Selected Poems. She also co-authored two screenplays with her late husband, Raymond Carver, and wrote the introduction to A New Path to the Waterfall, Carver's last book of poems.

Alone, Grey Evening in October
Conjuring Ghosts

I.
Before I curl into the couch
with a weak cup of tea
I pick cornflower yellow
from the pile of afghans
my Nana has knit for me
since my grandfather¹s death.
Wrapped around me from behind,
it folds me in its arms, comforting,
in a way I doubt he ever held her.
After her girls were grown, she took up
knitting to calm her gnarled nerves, to forget
how he sometimes followed her
in a borrowed blue car when he
should have been at the factory.
He always kept her
from knitting in their Newark apartment,
saying the tickety click
of the needles interrupted
his newspaper reading or the TV.
It was just another small penance
she had to pay for having
once loved someone else.

II.
These things still remind me
of someone else I once loved:
wind chimes, porch swings, rain.
For years, I tried to hold him,
Like hands grasping at a river:
It was the wrong gesture.
I always had such thirsty lips.
When he finally left,
over a decade ago, I cried
out "The Last Poem" and then swore
I'd never write another
about him. In fact, I rarely
think of him now, but here I am
with the wind chimes and the rain
whispering his name,
the empty porch swing
swaying.

III.
Even after the adoption, the name change,
my mother¹s face must have been
a constant reminder to Pop.
She never looked like his
other daughters, and she smiled
more. For decades he swayed
between doubt and rage.
He once confessed to his priest
that he was put on earth
to crucify his wife for her sins.
But stalking the woman
he possessed (even if by circumstance)
was the wrong gesture too,
and ultimately, she survived him.

IV.
The truth is that his jealousy and suspicions
fueled her own secret thirst, summoning
memories of the love she couldn't keep.
She had long forgotten the unpaid bills,
the playing cards, the beer cans, even
the other women.
What she held onto was how his hands
had made even flowers more beautiful.
Ultimately, their love was fleeting,
he was fleeing the law, or his wife,
(or her?)
the story changes, but in the end, the fact
of my mother, with her ghost face,
remains.

V.
Shaking off ghosts,
I settle into the woolly afghan's embrace,
sip my sweet tea, and turn the page
of a favorite book. Home alone,
husband and lover long lost,
my Nana knits,
her needles singing out their tickety click.

L.A.C.

PRAIRIE ROCK CROSSING

It was at the bottom of the rock pile
Covered by soil and later arrivals
The smell of sweat and aches
Raise like a spirit from that heap
Old Philip was under it all
A support that all us family got.

Russian wheat and Deutsch
Sent west to replace a bison herd
With pointed steeple and iron cross
Thus Peter became the new rock
Where prairie stones descended
To anchor a family made manifest.

Glen Shorts

THE SPIRIT

My daughter wears her clothes
I don’t mind
A long skirt and peasant blouse
And smiles
So reminiscent of her aunt
Who died of cancer.
Her grandfather looks at her indulgently
She looks so good, he says,
Who gives her this sense of fashion?
Her aunt does, I feel like saying.
And your love for the daughter gone
And for the granddaughter who lives
So much like her.

Abha Iyengar

BEST FRIENDS

Do you remember, I ask, and hold her hand.
She doesn't answer, so I go on

Do you remember when we were wheeled in
prams to Central park? We were dressed in
little hats and coats and matching leggings
that zipped up the sides and those dark brown
woolen bloomers to keep our baby bottoms
warm.. And we played our little baby games
and in the park there were only nannies
pushing English carriages