Carolyn Forche - Blue Hour

today the world is stiff and locked in place, pines still, skies droning, snow mounded, and everyone has gone “to work”

together into the blue but unbroken perishing

too many bones in too small a soul

torn curtain, shutters in wind

toward what end? what uniformity?

tunneling between worlds

twirling organdy dresses waving goodbye

two children in his arms

two discontinuous realms

un enfant qui meurt, wrapped in a trouser leg

under the blind sky’s surveillance

under the whip, invisible, in the not-there

under what conditions can we speak of

une enfant qui meurt wrapped in a trouser leg

unspeakable in language

unspoken thoughts, leaving us in their proximity, alone

until dawn in the fire tower

until this, that

vesture, vigil light, votive

visible only to God

walking the streets, tented in bedclothes

war-eyed in the warehouse of history

war no longer declared but only continued

warning us of its nature and our own

washing its windows until they vanish

was this not to know me?

watch them appear to recede: what are we seeing?

water calm to the wind line

water rosy with iron

waters filled with human belief

watery cathedral, a gold wash of light, a trembling—

we are as paper against the walls of the passage

we caused each other

we drove through disappearing villages

we hid among tangerine peels, lamb bones and blue figs

we lived in tents of fog

we returned to the border and walked toward the checkpoint

we take our citron pressé, your hand mine, and the clocks spin in reverse until you are floating in a flat green boat

we take our worldly goods, your hand, mine, and the clocks spin

we were spoken into being

were we not?

wet bouquets at the kiosk

wet paper of our flesh

what crawled out of the autumn wood was dementia

what did we retrieve? empty spectacles?

what do these questions ask?

what do we have to forget?

what end? what uniformity?

what fragmentary light?

what God does or does not forgive

what is closest to us

what is it? must be answered who is it?

what sees us without being seen

what waking life is to the dream

what was before, imperfectly erased

what were we doing as far away as this?

what you see is the beginning of life after death

what you see you shall become

when did we know?

when I opened the door

when it was possible to walk across the river

when one could hear, behind the curtain, the whole thing

when the thing had gone beyond the limits of a room

when this sunlight reaches the future

when time seems to us a queer thing

when we wake from our deaths

when you know the worst, you can return to cut stalks of iris in April

where at least one loveliness wanders

where else would they have fallen?

where everything destroyed was left intact

where he looked

where the helicopters landed, lifting trees from the ground

where the ore is crushed into yellowcake

where the sickness knew us

where there is some message to convey

where they go without sleep

where thinking takes place we have a right to say

while I lived in that other world, years went by in this one

while out on the cobalt sea the ship turns toward us

while we watched transfixed the repetitive novelty of death

who cries for the jasmin as he digs them up, and carries with him a can of black tobacco and a yellow finch in a cage

who if rope were writing would have hung himself

who in mirrors saw a strange woman

who no longer realized I was there

who returns from the journey with her eyes ruined

who wanted only to retrieve a few invisible souvenirs:

who wrote on the window in lipstick I will never forget you

whose white hands lift from this river the sudden flight of cranes

why do I seem no longer alive?

wide-planed wind of the sea

wild doves in a warehouse

willow, windthrow, winter, wisteria

wind etching the walls

wind singing in the chimney

windows X’d against fire

windshield wipers clearing a wedge of water

wisteria floating along the fence

with a camera hidden in a loaf of bread

with empty suitcases, pretending to be refugees

with how much uncertainty they told it

with revolutionary hope we searched, believing

with the flurry of a dovecote

without passing through thought

without personal history or desire for selfhood

without so much as a biscuit tin of water

without wandering too far into the past

woman in black holding daisies in paper

woman in mourning black with baskets of lemons and eggs

wood crates of cognac and ordnance

wooden crosses in snow

words burning in the windows

words carried by countless mouths

work shoes, soda cans, holy braided palm

world without having been

world without origin

would return to the point of departure

would reveal itself as other than chance

writing, an anguished wind

written over an open grave

x does not equal

yet the women dancing with white scarves

yet the women veiled in cirrus

you are the ghost through whom we see the wall

you come to earth in your sorrows

you, leaping tall fields, cornflower and milk

you might be the revenant of the earliest years, you might be within

you must leave, you cannot remain here, you must leave at once

you spit out your teeth, give it up

you will see the generation into which you should have been born

your churches will warehouse weapons and wheat

your freedom is an abyss

your hand awkward between us in the absence of love

your heart in the guise of mysterious words

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

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

“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.