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Carolyn Forche

Blue Hour

for Harry and Sean Christophe

These moments are immortal, and most transitory of all; no content may be secured from them…. Beams of their power stream into the ordered world and dissolve it again and again.

— Martin Buber

Sequestered Writing

Horses were turned loose in the child’s sorrow. Black and roan, cantering through snow.

The way light fills the hand with light, November with graves, infancy with white.

White. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls.

The way they withdrew from the child’s body and spoke as if it were not there.

What ghost comes to the bedside whispering You?

— With its no one without its I—

A dwarf ghost? A closet of empty clothes?

Ours was a ghost who stole household goods. Nothing anyone would miss.

Supper plates. Apples. Barbed wire behind the house.

At the end of the hall, it sleepwalks into a mirror wearing mother’s robe.

A bedsheet lifts from the bed and hovers. Face with no face. Come here.

The bookcase knows, and also the darkness of books. Long passages into,

Endless histories toward, sleeping pages about. Why else toss gloves into a grave?

A language that once sent ravens through firs. The open world from which it came.

Words holding the scent of an asylum fifty years. It is fifty years, then.

The child hears from within: Come here and know, below

And unbeknownst to us, what these fields had been.

Blue Hour

for Sean Christophe

The moon slips from its cerement, and my son, already disappearing into a man, moves toward his bed for the night, wrapped in a towel of lake scent.

A viola, night-voiced, calls into its past but nothing comes.

A woman alone rows across the lake.

Her life is intact, but what she thought could never be taken has been taken. An iron bridge railing one moment its shadow the next.

It is n’y voir que du bleu, it is blind to something. Nevertheless.

Even the most broken life can be restored to its moments.

My son rows toward me against the wind. For thirty-six years, he rows. In 1986, he is born in Paris.

Bice the clouds, watchet, indigo, woad.

We lived overlooking the cemetery. It was the summer of the Paris bombings. I walked him among the graves for what seemed hours but were clouds drifting across marble.

Believing it possible to have back the field in its flowering, my friend has brought me here, has given me an open window, the preludes, an echo of my son’s laughter on the rumpled lake.

Go wherever you can but keep returning to the present.

The human soul weighs twenty-six grams. A cathedral can become a dovecote.

I was born in America just after the war. My legs grew deformed, and so they had to be fitted with a special brace.

At night I banged the brace against the wooden crib bars and cried (so they say). The cries had to be stopped before I woke “the entire house. ”

In the morning, footsteps, a wind caught between roofs. From the quarry of souls they come into being: supernal lights, concealed light, light which has no end.