The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 7/17/08

[BlueIris]

"Wake"

Three nights you lay in our house.
Three nights in the chill of the body.
Did I want to prove how surely
I'd been left behind? In the room's great dark
I climbed up beside you onto our high bed, bed
we'd loved in and slept in, married
and unmarried.

There was a halo of cold around you
as if the body's messages carry further
in death, my own warmth taking on the silver-white
of a voice sent unbroken across the snow just to hear
itself in its clarity of calling. We were dead
a little while together then, serene
and afloat on the strange broad canopy
of the abandoned world.

—Tess Gallagher

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. My dear BlueIris...

How beautifully melancholy this is...

It reminds me of Khash, lying dead in his apartment for maybe a couple of days, before his parents found him...


But this poem and its lovely imagery!

Really beautiful...

...In the room's great dark
I climbed up beside you onto our high bed, bed
we'd loved in and slept in, married
and unmarried...


Thank you so much, sweetie...


:hug:

[BlueIris]

3. The loss of Khash is so sad.

[Westegg]

2. Superb. Thanks...

"Did I want to prove how surely
I'd been left behind?"

Powerful.

[BlueIris]

4. Westegg!

Nice to see you again.

[Westegg]

5. I pop in once in a while. Nice to see YOU!

[BlueIris]

6. Yeah, I'm always on the verge of giving up this fool's quest.

Especially now, when readership is so low. Le sigh.

[Westegg]

8. Fools' quests are the only ones that matter! ...

...well, probably not the ONLY ones that matter, but that sounded nice. In any case, there's much to be said for the quixotic undertaking, the seemingly pointless path, the absurd gesture, the magnificent folly. Fools walk in where angels fear to tread, they say? I'm no sure what that means, but where would we be if the madcaps of this world didn't regularly attempt the apparently impossible?

[RetroLounge]

7. This poem is very powerful!

She wrote it after her husband, Raymond Carver died of cancer.

:cry:

RL

[SidneyCarton]

9. That's kinda morbid.

I understand the beauty of love transcending death, and I do not disagree. But I do not think I would willing lie in bed with my wife if she died, no matter how much I love her.

Who is the poet, and when did she write this, it sounds almost like it was inspired by Poe?