Five Poems: Two Math Lessons: Riches: Dream Fable of Horse and Fish: The Untamed Thing: The Life of the Verbs
Gallagher, Jean
Five Poems by Jean Gallagher Two Math Lessons Grade 3 What belongs with what and how do you name it. Now that's a math I can do, I thought, opening to page 1, the very beginning, the...
...The gaggle, the pride...
...I ask the fish I am: are you sure you can give it up, the education, the ambitions, the plans...
...Him I will love with my whole disappearing act...
...Now that's a math I can do, I thought, opening to page 1, the very beginning, the first white crocus in the season of idea...
...Riches In the very midst of my riches, the gold gravel silting up in the future's little corners, I begin to wonder: where can I start to strip it...
...Five Poems by Jean Gallagher Two Math Lessons Grade 3 What belongs with what and how do you name it...
...The fish, out of love for the horse, hits the hard sidewalks and finds them very hard indeed...
...Him I will love jangling the bracelets of minutes stacked all the way, all the way, up both arms...
...Shy, slippery...
...You be the silent farmer playing up the ground for its harrow music, made half of dirt and half of the metal attentions, turning...
...Commonweal 2 5 July 16, 2004...
...Fell into the open hatch-door marked Factoring Out and found something to love: working it out unto zero, the weightless satisfaction, the clicking lock of nothing more to do...
...begins when you feel it slow down and start stopping: the grab-wheel, the what-if wheel, the where-is-it wheel, the clench-wheel...
...It brought itself, as the ocean does and does...
...How much can I set loose in the near-zero gravity of whatever my life floats in, the aqueous, imageless The Life of the Verbs process I dream up as God's mind...
...But what about the man waking and ticking like a fire beside me, the shining track of privacy running parallel to mine...
...The verbs whoosh through you, laughing like neutrinos, asking what are you made of...
...Let's see: no cat, no kids, no dog...
...Grade 9 I returned as the alien life-form of the 14-year-old...
...What's left is the untamed thing...
...Beginning with enter, beginning with offer, beginning again and again with allow...
...It slows down and undoes and what enters is only the life of the verbs...
...The happiness of that, the ease, the luxurious narrative possibilities of the geese, the crows, the family of smiling lions...
...Which you will forget, you can't help it, into its verbs...
...Him I will love the length of my unspooling ordinal numbers...
...Who brought it...
...Him I will love with the clock talking explicit trash in my throat...
...The practically invisible, snippy awfulness of the minus sign...
...Until page 2: the hard birth of abstraction, the transparent knife too heavy and sharp to use...
...The fish cries and cries its water away...
...Severed, whole, severe...
...The Untamed Thing Allow somehow for the untamed thing...
...Skim off the what you would...
...Its mane still works in the breeze like before...
...Dream Fable of Horse and Fish The horse I am runs deeper and deeper into the city, willingly trading the manifold wild for one wild herb with a common name but manifold possible tastes...
...The black, gut-punching spaces opening in the multiplication table, the utter damnability of 8 x 9. Now I am an astronaut cut loose from the physical ship in my deflating silver suit, losing something vital with every float-away, go-away, get-away second...
...Asking, exiting...
...It brings itself...
Vol. 131 • July 2004 • No. 13
