#tess gallagher

[shy-girl04]

The best love poems confirm something we secretly felt but never said.

Tess Gallagher

[profanityandprose]

“A secret, like an echo wrapped around a shadow.”

— Tess Gallagher.

[atwoheadeddeer]

Tess Gallagher

[poems-from-around-the-world]

I Stop Writing the Poem - Tess Gallagher - USA

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives or who dies, I’m still a woman. I’ll always have plenty to do. I bring the arms of his shirt together. Nothing can stop our tenderness. I’ll get back to the poem. I’ll get back to being a woman. But for now there’s a shirt, a giant shirt in my hands, and somewhere a small girl standing next to her mother watching to see how it’s done.

[abellinthecupboard]

The suddenness of it! Could this be a sign of hope? Or is that an American question.

— from "A Stroke of Sky", Tess Gallagher, "Dear Ghosts," (2006)

[milkymarble]

what’s long-dead and buried

jihyun yun, tess gallagher, wes anderson - isle of dogs, @sleepycorvid(twitter)

[violettesiren]

I step outside to get a clear view of the night's first stars, but something urgent and full of an ancient, inexplicable pain is aloft in the darkness of the hemlocks. Again and again it makes its shrill cry of panic that is a plea and a question. One bird after dark. What has befallen its nest, its wing, its sun? So little to tell. Not even the word "tomorrow" is world enough to offer myself hearing it.

To whom can I offer my Heart? by Tess Gallagher

[libraryleopard]

Poetry

Explores loss, cancer, and death

Favorite poems: "My Unopened Life," "Lady Betty," "Apparition," "Dream Doughnuts," "Dear Ghosts,," "Old Spot," and "Sixteenth Anniversary"

[dk-thrive]

That’s why I love most the moment when you take your lips away.

Sometimes the dawn sky clings to itself like that in the moment just after multitudes of stars have faded. That’s why I love most the moment when you take your lips away.

— Tess Gallagher, from “His Moment,” Portable Kisses (Graywolf Press, 1994) (via The Vale of Soul Making)

[gwydionmisha]

Choices By Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side of the house to cut saplings, and clear a view to snow on the mountain. But when I look up, saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in the uppermost branches. I don’t cut that one. I don’t cut the others either. Suddenly, in every tree,   an unseen nest where a mountain   would be.

[elizabethanism]

But you, you can

lie down and be enlivened, kissed

into yet another imperishable

collaboration on the way to me.

—Tess Gallagher

[profanityandprose]

“Your unwritten pages lift an ongoing dusk in me.”

— Tess Gallagher.

[mumblingsage]

Then she was quiet with him. And he with her. The world hummed with crickets, bees nudging the lupines. It is like that when the earth counts its riches--noisy with desire, even when desire has strengthened our bodies and moved us into the soak of harmony.

from ‘Urgent Story’, Tess Gallagher in Dear Ghosts

[outoflizworld]

Instructions to the Double

- Tess Gallagher

So now it’s your turn,

little mother of silences, little

father of half-belief. Take up

this face, these daily rounds

with a cabbage under each arm

convincing the multitudes

that a well-made-anything

could save them. Take up

most of all, these hands

trained to an ornate piano

in a house on the other side

of the country.

I’m staying here

without music, without

applause. I’m not going

to wait up for you. Take

your time. Take mine

too. Get into some trouble

I’ll have to account for. Walk

into some bars alone

with a slit in your skirt. Let

the men follow you on the street

with their clumsy propositions, their

loud hatreds of this and that. Keep

walking. Keep your head

up. They are calling to you–slut, mother,

virgin, whore, daughter, adultress, lover,

mistress, bitch, wife, cunt, harlot,

betrothed, Jezebel, Messalina, Diana,

Bethsheba, Rebecca, Lucretia, Mary,

Magdelena, Ruth, you–Niobe,

woman of the tombs.

Don’t stop for anything, not

a caress or a promise. Go

to the temple of the poets, not

the one like a run-down country club,

but the one on fire

with so much it wants

to be done with. Say all the last words

and the first: hello, goodbye, yes,

I, no, please, always, never.

If anyone from the country club

asks if you write poems, say

your name is Lizzie Borden.

Show him your axe, the one

they gave you with a silver

blade, your name engraved there

like a whisper of their own.

If anyone calls you a witch,

burn for him; if anyone calls you

less or more than you are

let him burn for you.

It’s a dangerous mission. You

could die out there. You

could live forever.

[coffinmouth]

No matter who lives

or who dies, I'm still a woman.

I'll always have plenty to do.

—Tess Gallagher, I Stop Writing the Poem

[havebeenherebefore]

Choices by Tess Gallagher