Tweety, gouache on paper, 20" x 16" framed, by Josie Gray

Sah Sin* by Tess Gallagher

*"Sah Sin" is Coast Salish for hummingbird

 

This painting and handwritten poem are offered together for $1500.
Please contact us for more information.

 

I found the hummingbird
clutched in torpor
to the feeder on the day
my one-time student
appeared. I sent him into
the house and tried to
warm it, lifting my blouse
and caching it, (as I’d heard
South American women did)
under a breast.

It didn’t stir, but I held it there
like a dead star for awhile
inside my heart-socket
to make sure, remembering the story
of a mother in Guatemala
whose baby had died
far from home. She pretended
it was living, holding it
to her breast the long way
back on the bus, so no one
would take it from her before
she had to give it over.
When the others on the journey
looked across the aisle
they saw only a mother and
her sleeping child, so tenderly
did she hold the swaddled form.

Miles and miles we flew
and I only knew what
that breast was for
all these years when the form
of your not-there arrived. We
were impenetrably together
then, as that mother must have been,
reaching home at last, her child
having been kept alive an extra while
by the tender glances
of strangers.

When I went inside
my student and I found
a small cedar box
with a Nootka salmon
painted onto its glass lid.
I told him about all the dead
hummingbirds I’d heard people
in the Northwest saved
in their freezers because
they found them too beautiful
to bury. We made a small mausoleum
for Sah Sin under the sign
of the salmon, so the spear of her beak
could soar over death awhile longer.
Next we propped the box
on the window ledge
facing out toward the mountains.

Then we went on about
our visit. My student
had become famous in the East
for his poems. Now he was
a little bored with being
a poet. He asked some questions
about what I might be
writing—courteously, as one
inquires about someone
unheard of for awhile.
I made some tea
and served it in the maroon cups
the size of ducks’ eggs
so it would take
a long while to drink. Fame.
It was so good to sit
with him again. He seemed
to have miraculously survived
everything to make his way
to my house again.
 

Copyright © 2004 Tess Gallagher