Carolyn Forche - Blue Hour

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

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.

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

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.

— George Burgess, 1850

“now appears to us in a mysterious light”

“did this happen? could it have happened?”

“everything ahead of her clear for the rest of her life”

“La terre nous aimait un peu je me souviens.”

“I try to keep from wanting the morphine. I pray with both hands.”

“Lima, Alpha, Uniform, November, Charlie, Hotel, Echo, November, Alpha, Bravo, Lima, Echo. Pap. Lima, Charlie, Alpha, Zero, One. Acknowledge. Out.”

“man and cart disappeared in the blast, but their shadows remained on the bridge”

“these diaries a form of weather”

(a future hinting at itself)

(all of this must remain)

(on illness, after radiation; a mysterious illness)

(something) whispering

(the sadness when a hand—)

— with the resistance of a corpse to the hands of the living—

“open the book of what happened”

a barnloft of horse dreams, with basin and bedclothes

a bit of polished quiet from a locked church

a black coat in smoke

a black map of clouds on a lake

a blackened book-leaf, straw and implements

a blue daybook hidden in my bed with his name

a branch weighted with pears

a brittle crack of dawnlight

a broken clock, a boy wakened by his father’s whip, then the world as if whorled into place —

a broken equation, a partita

a bullet clicking through her hair

a bullet-holed supper plate

a burnt room strewn with toy tanks

a century passing through it

a chaos of microphones

a city a thousand years

a city shaken and snowing

a coin of moonlight on the shattered place

a confusion of birds and fishes

a consciousness not within us

a corpse broken into many countries

a cup of sleep

a desire to live as long as the world itself

a door opening another door

a feather forced through black accordioned paper

a field of birds roasted by the heavens

a goodness that must forget itself

a grave strewn with slipper flowers

a groundskeeper’s knowledge of graves

a hole in light, an entrance

a horse grazing in an imaginary field

a horse of wire, wine-corks and wax

a horse tangled in its tether

a hotel haunted by a wedding dress

a house fallen in

a house fallen into itself

a house in time, years from the others, light-roofed, walls shimmering

a hurried life, a knife on newsprint

a lace of recent snow

a language known only to parrots

a life in which nothing is lived

a light, n’y voir que du bleu, blind to something

a litany of broken but remembered events

a little hotel in the city with its windows open

a little invention for sweeping crumbs from the table

a locket’s parted lovers face to face

a man repainting his wooden house in stopped time

a man vanishing while he danced

a man who built cottages for tourists until he went blind

a memory through which one hasn’t lived

a message deflected by other messages

a message from a secret self

a mist of geese rising

a moment of bluesmoke

a moment of sycamores in low mist

a moon caught in the bare hold of firs

a moon haloed in high cirrus

a name which should not be written

a new world, entirely other

a no-longer-beyond

a parcel of copper wire, plastique and a clock

a parrot learning its language from a ghost

a past to come

a phrase shifting epochs

a pinch of salt, a fist of sugar

a plumbago curtain withdrawn from the radiance

a poplar in the sun, a pouch of coins, between layers of sleep where one lives another life beside this, awakening in the grave, brushing mother’s hair in the kitchen

a random life caught in a net of purpose

a record-keeper of human and earthly life

a rifle loaded with moments

a rivulet of sweat on the brow of the one keeping watch

a road erased by light

a road that ends nothing

a salvage yard of burnt office furniture and household goods

a scarf of smoke from a mouth

a schooner sailing in a bottle of light