Not a terribly happy valentine! But sometimes I think the way we most appreciate the ones we love is when we are most aware of the presence of death -- ours and theirs.
This poem is one of a large group of poems Tess Gallagher wrote after the death of her husband the short story writer and poet Ray Carver. Carver had been hospitalized with alcoholism a number of times before he quit drinking. He and Gallagher met at a writers' conference and ended up buying a house together.
Black Valentine
I run the comb through his lush hair,
letting it think into my wrist
the way the wrist whispers to the cards
with punctuation and savvy in a game of solitaire.
So much not to be said the scissors
are saying in the hasp and sheer
of the morning. Eleven years I've cut
his hair and even now, this last time, we hide
fear to save pleasure
as bulwark. My dearest -- the hair says as it brushes my
thighs -- my only -- on the way to the floor. If the hair
is a soul-sign, the soul obeys our gravity, piles up
in animal mounds and worships the feet. We're
silent so peace rays over us like Bernice's hair
shaken out across the heavens. If there were gods
we are to believe they animated her shorn locks
with more darkness than light, and harm
was put by after the Syrian campaign, and
harm was put by as you tipped the cards
from the table like a child bored
with losing. I spread my hair like a tent over us
to make safety wear its twin heads, one to face death,
the other blasted so piteously by love
you throw the lantern of the moment against
the wall and take me in with our old joke, the one
that marks my northern skies, "Hey, babe," you say
like a man who knows how to live on earth. "Hey,"
with your arm around my hips, "what you doing
after work?" Silly to ask now if the hair
she put on the altar, imagining her power over
his passage, was dead or living.
-- Tess Gallagher, from Moon Crossing Bridge (Graywolf Press,1992)
During their very happy 10 years together, their house in Syracuse became such a popular place for writers to hang out that they had to put up a sign outside that read "Writers At Work" in order to be left alone. They married six weeks before his death from lung cancer in 1988.
The Bernice -- or Berenice -- in the poem is the bride of Ptolemy III of Egypt (243 BC), who fought the Third Syrian War. Berenice swore to the goddess Aphrodite to sacrifice her long blonde hair, of which she was extremely proud, if her husband returned safely. He did, and she had her hair cut and placed it in the goddess' temple. By the next morning the hair had disappeared. To keep the furious king from punishing everyone in sight, the court astronomer announced that the offering had so pleased the goddess that she had placed it in the sky -- a cluster of stars that have since been called Berenice's Hair.
Inscribed on Ray Carver's tombstone is the following short poem -- all the valentine, I'd say, anyone could ever want:
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.
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