Blue Hour Read online

  Blue

  Hour

  Poems

  Carolyn Forché

  for Harry and Sean Christophe

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Also by Carolyn Forché

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Sequestered Writing

  Blue Hour

  Curfew

  Nocturne

  Refuge

  Writing Kept Hidden

  In the Exclusion Zones

  Hive

  Prayer

  On Earth

  Afterdeath

  Notes

  About the Publisher

  Sequestered Writing

  Horses were turned loose in the child’s sorrow. Black and roan, cantering through snow.

  The way light fills the hand with light, November with graves, infancy with white.

  White. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls.

  The way they withdrew from the child’s body and spoke as if it were not there.

  What ghost comes to the bedside whispering You?

  —With its no one without its I—

  A dwarf ghost? A closet of empty clothes?

  Ours was a ghost who stole household goods. Nothing anyone would miss.

  Supper plates. Apples. Barbed wire behind the house.

  At the end of the hall, it sleepwalks into a mirror wearing mother’s robe.

  A bedsheet lifts from the bed and hovers. Face with no face. Come here.

  The bookcase knows, and also the darkness of books. Long passages into,

  Endless histories toward, sleeping pages about. Why else toss gloves into a grave?

  A language that once sent ravens through firs. The open world from which it came.

  Words holding the scent of an asylum fifty years. It is fifty years, then.

  The child hears from within: Come here and know, below

  And unbeknownst to us, what these fields had been.

  Blue Hour

  for Sean Christophe

  The moon slips from its cerement, and my son, already disappearing into a man, moves toward his bed for the night, wrapped in a towel of lake scent.

  A viola, night-voiced, calls into its past but nothing comes.

  A woman alone rows across the lake. Her life is intact, but what she thought could never be taken has been taken. An iron bridge railing one moment its shadow the next.

  It is n’y voir que du bleu, it is blind to something. Nevertheless.

  Even the most broken life can be restored to its moments.

  My son rows toward me against the wind. For thirty-six years, he rows. In 1986, he is born in Paris.

  Bice the clouds, watchet, indigo, woad.

  We lived overlooking the cemetery. It was the summer of the Paris bombings. I walked him among the graves for what seemed hours but were clouds drifting across marble.

  Believing it possible to have back the field in its flowering, my friend has brought me here, has given me an open window, the preludes, an echo of my son’s laughter on the rumpled lake.

  Go wherever you can but keep returning to the present.

  The human soul weighs twenty-six grams. A cathedral can become a dovecote.

  I was born in America just after the war. My legs grew deformed, and so they had to be fitted with a special brace.

  At night I banged the brace against the wooden crib bars and cried (so they say). The cries had to be stopped before I woke “the entire house.”

  In the morning, footsteps, a wind caught between roofs. From the quarry of souls they come into being: supernal lights, concealed light, light which has no end.

  Everything in the world has a spirit released by its sound.

  The room turns white again, and white. For years I have opened my eyes and not known where I was.

  It was like a kettle wrapped in towels and bubbling, spewing camphor clouds against walls turning the world beyond the windows white.

  I couldn’t move, and when they lifted the tented sheet covering the crib it was only to touch my face.

  This was the year my mother’s mother died in the asylum, Eloise. Mindless. Without protection from the world.

  Her hair, white, everywhere, her eyes the windows of a ruined house.

  Like a kettle, but made of apothecary glass, so that it was possible to watch the liquid boil inside.

  Sometime later I would find the suitcase of clippings: walls smeared with waste, bedsheets mapped in urine, and how later, when Eloise burned, they were still tied to their chairs.

  By late summer, the fields are high with foamflower, fleabane, loosestrife, mullein, and above these wings like chapel windows.

  The first love is also there, running through the field as if he could escape.

  They were in their chairs and in their beds, tied to the bedrails. Some had locked themselves in the dispensary, as more than fire they feared the world.

  Here grow bellflower and blind gentian, blue-eyed grass and touch-me-not. I don’t know who came into that room but spirits also came.

  Objects in the room grew small grew large again. The doll laughed like my mother’s mother.

  In every future window their white gowns, a stone ruin behind a sign forbidding trespass for years to come.

  They came into the room and left, and later my mother would suffer the same emptiness.

  In the years just after the war, it was not as certain that a child would live to be grown. Trucks delivered ice and poured coal into bins below the houses.

  You see, one can live without having survived.

  I have returned to Paris: a morning flecked with sparrows, the garret casements open over the blue-winged roofs.

  The two-storey windows a spackled fresco of sky.

  From the loggia, it is possible to gaze out over the graves. In the armoire, books, and little paper soldiers fighting the Franco-Prussian War.

  At the farm-table many afternoons with the windows open, I conjugated the future perfect, ivy shivering on cemetery walls, the infant asleep—

  How is it possible that I am living here, as if a childhood dream had found an empty theater in which to mount a small production of its hopes?

  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 nothi
ng, 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.

  Curfew

  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

  Nocturne

  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.

  Perhaps those born after the war are those whose lives the war took.

  An abandoned house, after all, will soon give itself back, and its walls become as unreadable as symbols on silk.

  With the departed, a sense of time, and sleep even sleep is taken, and the world appears as if it were—

  Every spring I return to her, laying my thoughts to rest like a wreath on water.

  These are the words no longer. Here are the photographs taken when we were alive.

  Refuge

  In the blue silo of dawn, in earth-smoke and birch copse, where the river of hands meets the Elbe.

  In the peace of your sleeping face, Mein Liebchen.

  We have our veiled memory of running from police dogs through a blossoming orchard, and another

  Of not escaping them. That was—ago—(a lifetime), but now you are invisible in my arms, a soul

  Acquiring speech, the body its blind light, whispering Noli me frangere even as it is in death shattered.

  We were one in the other. When the doves rose at once, and our refuge became wing-light—

  Writing Kept Hidden

  The black fire of ink on paper took hold of their souls—incorporeal fire.

  There was no protection this fire couldn’t touch nor darkness nor a moment.

  It lasted as long as a dream it was no dream. Heteroglossia of nervous shortwave, cloud of blown walls.

  In the barracks, those who had sketched themselves in coal and smoke became coal and smoke.

  And the living remained, linking unknown things to the known: residue, scapular, matchlight, name on a tongue.

  Then, for an hour, the war slept, and rain filled the cisterns with silence.

  Our windows faced east, and on August evenings, the sky was a blue no longer spoken.

  —Beirut, winter 1983

  In the Exclusion Zones

  Ash over conifers and birches, over berry thickets. Resembling snow and its synonyms. Silvered fields of millet.

  A silence approaching bees of the invisible or the scent of mint.

  One need not go further than a white towel hung in an open door.

  Hive

  into a light most unexpected the glass hives

  executed labors whose writings in a darkness are lost

  meanwhile they exhaust the city’s supplies

  and live only in the midst however abundant

  inaudible to them the murmur that comes to us

  song of abundance psalms of grief

  an entire absence of hesitation

  whereby they break with the past as though with an enemy

  it is not without prescience their summoning

  as though nothing is happening will come back

  to live as long as the world itself in those
who come after

  too vast to be seen too alien to be understood

  prefers what is not yet visible to that which is

  as a society organizes itself and rises so does a shrinkage enter

  so crowded does the too prosperous city become

  the era of revolutions may close and work become the barricade

  suddenly abandoning generations to come

  the abode of the future wrapped in a shroud

  a door standing not now where once it stood

  we are so made that nothing contents us

  Prayer

  Begin again among the poorest, moments off, in another time and place.

  Belongings gathered in the last hour, visible invisible:

  Tin spoon, teacup, tremble of tray, carpet hanging from sorrow’s balcony.

  Say goodbye to everything. With a wave of your hand, gesture to all you have known.

  Begin with bread torn from bread, beans given to the hungriest, a carcass of flies.

  Take the polished stillness from a locked church, prayer notes left between stones.

  Answer them and hoist in your net voices from the troubled hours.

  Sleep only when the least among them sleeps, and then only until the birds.

  Make the flatbed truck your time and place. Make the least daily wage your value.

  Language will rise then like language from the mouth of a still river. No one’s mouth.

  Bring night to your imaginings. Bring the darkest passage of your holy book.

  The recollections of a whole life, the consciousness of spiritual existence, and all which is mightiest and deepest in our nature, become brighter, even in opposition to extreme bodily languor. In the immediate vicinity of death, the mind enters on an unaccustomed order of sensations, a region untrodden before, from which few, very few travelers have returned, and from which those few have brought back but vague remembrances; sometimes accompanied with a kind of homesickness for the higher sphere of which they had then some transient prospect. Here, amidst images, dim images, of solemnity or peace, of glory or of terror, the pilgrim pursues his course alone, and is lost to our eye.