Carolyn Forché

Behind us a sea-cliff, landfall, ahead the wind,

tar-smoke, the sea, a carrick.

We sway on a bridge between them

above a great shattering. We have left

the verge, our certainty, and walk across

a chasm to the cries of cormorants, fulmars,

the wings of mute swans singing in flight.

Below us bladder-wrack, sea-froth and dulse,

sea against rocks in heave and salt, and between

bridge and sea an abyss we cross, as behind us

the headland recedes—cottages and boats, clouds and sheep,

a piping of oystercatchers dying out, and the callings

of kittiwake preparing to leave their nesting ground.

The bridge rises and falls with our steps, moving in wind

so we must hold fast the ropes

once made of hides and the hair of cows’ tails

hoisted over the silvering salmon as they leapt

into bag-nets too heavy to lift, hauled

across this very bridge that rings in wind

like ship’s rigging, volary of rock pipits,

bazaar of guillemots, colony of puffins,

and in the blackest water below us ghosts

of salmon, empty nets, and on the carrick

ruins of boats, nets, buoys and fisherman’s bothy.

We have only to keep walking for the bridge to go on.

The carrick is a foothold in the distance, a stone in time.

When we reach it, not only may the salmon return

but you will be alive again, wake me when we reach the carrick.

March. The Neva still white, crisp as communion, and as we walk

its bridges, steadying ourselves on the glaze, tubes of ice

slide from the gutter-spouts to the astonishment of dogs, some of whom

have not seen spring before, while others pretend not to remember,

and a woman bends over her late potatoes, sorting and piling, and you say

“in this house lived a friend of my father who was killed” and

“in that house lived another, and in this, a very bad poet no longer known.”

We come to the synagogue and go in, as far back as a forgotten holiness,

where, we are told, you can whisper into the wall and be heard on the

other side.

But the rabbi doesn’t know you are deaf. We whisper into the wall to

please him.

A sign in Cyrillic asks for donations, and in exchange we apparently buy

dozens of matzos wrapped in paper. There are only a hundred

of us left in the city. While we are here, a fisherman waits on the river,

seated with a bucket beside him, his line in the hole, but in the last hour

water has surrounded his slab of ice, so unbeknownst

he is floating downstream, having caught nothing, cold and delirious

with winter thoughts, as they all are and were, and as for rescue,

no one will come. It is spring. The Neva, white and crisp as communion.

We have come far south.

Beyond here, the oldest women

shelling limas into black shawls.

Portillo scratching his name

on the walls, the slender ribbons

of piss, children patting the mud.

If we go on, we might stop

in the street in the very place

where someone disappeared

and the words Come with us! we might

hear them. If that happened, we would

lead our lives with our hands

tied together. That is why we feel

it is enough to listen

to the wind jostling lemons,

to dogs ticking across the terraces,

knowing that while birds and warmer weather

are forever moving north,

the cries of those who vanish

might take years to get here.

A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you

still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,

darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.

Through wild gorse and sea-wrack, through heather and torn wool

you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:

the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,

there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow wick lamps,

whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,

the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.

You say to me stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his

lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be

their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.

In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,

seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out

for a long time. Also, when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,

and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.

That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing

to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread

from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.