Blue Hour Read online

  your light narrow coffin

  your mother waving goodbye in the flames

  your notebooks, the sorrow of ink

  your things have been taken

  your things have been taken away

  zero

  May 2001

  Afterdeath

  from the quarry of souls they come into being

  supernal lights, concealed light, that which has no end

  that which thought cannot attain

  the going-forth, the as yet cannot be heard

  —as a flame is linked to its burning coal

  to know not only what is, but the other of what is

  Notes

  “Blue Hour” When my son was an infant in Paris, we woke together in the light the French call l’heure bleue, between darkness and day, between the night of a soul and its redemption, an hour associated with pure hovering. In Kabbalah, blue is hokhmah, the color of the second sefirah. In Tibetan Buddhism, the hour before dawn is associated with the ground luminosity, or “clear light,” arising at the moment of death. It is not a light apprehended through the senses, but is said to be the radiance of mind’s true nature.

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

  —John Cage to Oskar Fischinger, 1984

  “In the Exclusion Zones” refers to the thirty-kilometer radius of contaminated lands immediately surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

  “Hive” is after Maurice Maeterlinck.

  “On Earth” was written during the spring of 2001.

  Gnostic abecedarian hymns date from the third century A.D. Along with Christian and Buddhist texts, they were recovered from small towns on the northern fringe of the Taklamakan Desert early in the twentieth century. The texts were written in seventeen languages, including Sogdian and Tocharian, as well as Aramaic and the “Estrangelo script,” a script for Syriac.

  appears to feel the soul go forth

  —Lucretius, De rerum natura (translated by W. H. Mallock)

  a knowledge that burns thought

  —Maurice Blanchot

  I am alone, so there are four of us

  —Gaston Bachelard

  La terre nous aimait un peu je me souviens

  —René Char

  behind the face that speaks to us and to whom we speak

  —Emmanuel Levinas

  black with burnt-up meaning

  —Julia Kristeva

  Ça ne veut pas rien dire: this does not mean nothing

  Ce voyage, je voulais le refaire: this journey I wanted to make again

  dans le vrai: in the midst of things

  enough seen. enough had. enough

  —Arthur Rimbaud

  idam agnaye, na mama: this is for the fire, not for us.

  —Vedic mantra

  Il n’y a pas d’absence irremplaçable: there is no absence that cannot be replaced

  —René Char

  J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi / J’ai tellement marché tellement parlé: I have dreamed so strongly of you / I have walked so much, talked so much

  —attributed to Robert Desnos

  not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest

  —Walter Benjamin

  oder nicht: or not

  on lave les corps, on les prépare pour l’ensevelissement: one washes the bodies, one prepares them for burial

  pleroma: fullness, plenitude; in Gnostic theology, the spiritual universe as the abode of God and of the totality of the divine powers and emanations

  musée hypothétique: hypothetical museum

  —after the painter Ashley Ashford-Brown, of Ivry-sur-Seine

  the very language of lack

  — Edmond Jabès

  une enfant qui meurt: a child who dies

  zero: also the “pure zero” of C. S. Peirce’s semiotic metaphysics

  With gratitude to my editor, Terry Karten; my literary agent, Virginia Barber; the poets Frank Bidart, Robert Creeley, Barbara Cully, Forrest Gander, Louise Glück, Lise Goett, Ellen Hinsey, Fanny Howe, Ilya Kaminsky, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Honor Moore, Michael Palmer, Robert Pinsky, Lloyd Schwartz, C. D. Wright; and, as ever, my friend Svetozar Daniel Simko and my dear husband, Harry Mattison, for readings of this work during its making.

  ALSO BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ

  Gathering the Tribes

  The Country Between Us

  The Angel of History

  Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century

  Poetry of Witness (Editor)

  I am deeply grateful to J. Patrick Lannan and Lannan Foundation for the support that made this book possible, and also to Robert and Peggy Boyers, editors of Salmagundi, where “Blue Hour” and “Nocturne” were originally published, and Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding, publishers of Brick, where “Afterdeath” and “Refuge” first appeared.

  These moments are immortal, and most transitory of all; no content may be secured from them…. Beams of their power stream into the ordered world and dissolve it again and again.

  —Martin Buber

  Perennial

  Books by Carolyn Forché:

  BLUE HOUR: Poems

  ISBN0-06-009913-5 (paperback)

  “Part of poetry’s tragic knowledge is that elegy is endless. Yet in its power to recall and to memorialize, elegy also effaces time and reinvests loss, the lost, with life. It is a form of overcoming, essential to our knowing of, and dwelling in, the present, and to our becoming human. As Blue Hour demonstrates with such startling range of invention, Carolyn Forché is one of the contemporary masters of that form, that act.” —Michael Palmer

  “An eerily beautiful, bruised, and persuasive book.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  ANGEL OF HISTORY

  ISBN 0-06-092584-1 (paperback)

  WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

  Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster—war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb—Forché’s ambitions and compelling collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable.

  THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US

  ISBN 0-06-090926-9 (paperback)

  LAMONT POETRY SELECTION

  The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Forché worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970s. Forché’s other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone’s words, coming from far and going far.

  “Here is a poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual.” —Margaret Atwood

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  Available wherever books are sold, or call 1-800-331-3761 to order.

  Copyright

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers.

  BLUE HOUR. Copyright © 2003 by Carolyn Forché. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © JUNE
2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-00423-9

  First Perennial edition published 2004.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Forché, Carolyn.

  Blue Hour / by Carolyn Forché.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-06-009912-7

  I. Title.

  PS3556.O68 B58 2003

  811′.54—dc21 2002027270

  ISBN 0-06-009913-5 (pbk.)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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