Tess Gallagher

Dear Ghosts,

my friend is back from Cairo.
He is tired in the eyes from all he has seen.
Tired too from drinking whiskey straight
in the little dusty cafes, keeping up with the company.
It is 1991, before the bad business
of Iraq, before my own time in Cairo.

We drink a little whiskey together,
joining one far midnight to another, because
my black-haired orphan is with us--she whose brown eyes
add a crackling to the night. Her glances,
black butterflies of the general soul, join me to one
who is missing, who sleeps like a hive of wild honey
with his sweetness intact, like a blue door
sure and firm in the swift corridors
of the night. He who tries to wrest shards of love
from the world in broad daylight, who loves
only a little at first, then madly.

Love, such a run-down subject, says the ancient poet
of Rio. My orphan smiles and clicks
her whiskey glass to mine.

In Cairo the camels throw the weight of their haunches
onto their knees and rise up. An old man passes through
the cafe swinging from a chain his brass cylinder
embossed with stars and half-moons.
The charred droplets of burnt musk rain over us,
seep through our sleeves onto our skin.
My friend is talking about his Italian motorcycle.

Love, such a run-down subject, especially,
forced as I am, to mix these living creatures
with ghosts, with the axe-edge beauty
of a woman's indifference and the sleeping lips
of that one who lies even more deeply asleep in me.

Suddenly the bar is noisy, the music
a raw throb at the base of the brain. We can't talk
about love or anything else in here. Time
to put our arms around each other's waists--my man,
my woman, my unapproachable dream.
Time to walk out into the pungent streets of Cairo
with kisses of good night on a street corner
where it is dark and cool enough
for weddings that happen all night long
to the frantic pulse of the tabla. Move back, the men
are dancing, the men are showing their sex
in their hips, their bellies and waists. Rose water
is splashing our brows on this street corner, unappointed
as we are, but bound inexactly by whiskey,
loud music, Italian motorcycles, by the unknown
parents of my orphan.

And in the wide silence of each step,
the implosive blue rose drops unknowingly
into my thigh to preserve love's ache, love's
incandescent whisper under the black smell of mountains.
And I don't know why
we are together, dear ghosts, or why
we have to part. Only that it is precious
and that I love
this run-down subject.

---

Tess Gallagher is a poet, short fiction writer, and essayist. Among her many books are Moon Crossing Bridge, Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, At the Owl Woman Saloon, The Lover of Horses, and A Concert of Tenses. contents | previous | next