My Unopened Life, gouache on paper, 16" by 20" by Josie Gray

Poem by the same name by Tess Gallagher

 

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

 

 

My Unopened Life

lay to the right of my plate

like a spoon squiring a knife, waiting

patiently for soup or the short destiny

of dessert at the eternal picnic—unsheltered

picnic at the mouth of the sea

that dares everything forgotten to huddle

at the periphery of a checked cloth spread

under the shadowy, gnarled penumbra

of the madrona. Hadn’t I done well enough

with the life I’d seized, sure as a cat with

its mouthful of bird, bird with its belly full of

worm, worm like an acrobat of darkness

keeping its moist nose to the earth, soaring

perpetually into darkness without so much as

the obvious question: why all this darkness?

And even in the belly of the bird: why

only darkness?

 

The bowl of the spoon

collects entire rooms just lying there next

to the knife. It makes brief forays into

the mouth delivering cargoes of ceilings

and convex portraits of teeth

posing as stalactites of

a serially extinguished cave

 

from whence we do nothing but stare out

at the sea, collecting little cave-ins of

perception sketched on the moment

to make more tender the house of the suicide

in which everything was so exactly

where it had been left by someone missing.

Nothing, not even the spoon he abandoned

near the tea cup, could be moved without

seemingly altering the delicious

universe of his intention.

 

So we are each lit briefly by engulfments

of space like the worm in the beak of

the bird, yielding to sudden. corridors

of light-into-light, never asking:

why, tell me why

all this light?

 

Copyright © 2004 Tess Gallagher