Free Blue Hour by Carolyn Forche Page A

had found an empty theater in which to mount a small production of its hopes?

    The doors of the coal chutes open. It is the grave of
Svoboda.
A night paved with news reports, the sky breaking that the world could be otherwise.
    One does not forget stones versus tanks. When our very existence broadcast an appeal. Shall not say
adieu
when a country ceases to be.
    A little later, a burial on a hillside in a pine box.
    The empty flesh like stone beneath my hands—
    A field lifted into a train window.
    Under the ice, hay flowers, anne’s lace and lupines. My father digging through snow in a fatigue no sleep could relieve.
    And the first love, sequestered in an attic room until spring.

    We row to the middle of the lake in a guideboat a century old, water pewter in a coming-storm light, a diminishing signature of smoke from one of the cabins.
    Will his life open to hers, she asks, now that she has traveled all the way to the edge of herself?
    At night we sleep under blankets also a century old, beside cold stoves forged at Horseshoe, again a hundred years.
    At late day the lake stills, and the hills on the far shore round themselves in the water.
    We climb over rock moss and lichen, through fern stands and up the rain-slicked trail to the peak.
    No longer could she live alone. As if dead, looking into a mirror with no face.
    Star-spangle, woodsia, walking leaf, the ghosts of great blue heron.
    What one of us lives through, each must, so that this, of which we are part, will know itself.
    Here, where there was almost nothing, we waited in the birch-lit clouds, holding the uncertain hand of a lost spirit.

    When my son was an infant we woke for his early feeding at
l’heure bleue
—cerulean, gentian, hyacinth, delft,
jouvence.
What were also the milk hours.
    This one who had come toward me all my life now gazed at the skies above Montparnasse as if someone were there, gesturing to him from the slate light.
    He looked at me and the asylum shimmered, assembled again into brick-light and wards of madness. Emptiness left my mother. The first love in field upon field.
    The dolls were dolls, the curtain a curtain. The one in the grave said yes.
Adieu,
country.
Adieu,
Franco-Prussian War.

Curfew
    for Sean
    The curfew was as long as anyone could remember
    Certainty’s tent was pulled from its little stakes
    It was better not to speak any language
    There was a man cloaked in doves, there was chandelier music
    The city, translucent, shattered but did not disappear
    Between the no-longer and the still-to-come
    The child asked if the bones in the wall
    Belonged to the lights in the tunnel
    Yes, I said, and the stars nailed shut his heaven
     

    protected from the silence she slid she too into this loss of self that reaches its height
    and is reversed in a clump of charred roses
    —Jacques Dupin

Nocturne
    an elegy
    What happened? His face was visible then not. Around him snow fell, but over him grass remained, wet and young and shaped like a coffin.
    I laid her in the snow, she who I was, and walked away.
    And the house?
Shuttered against fog, awake, windblown.
    “The children had cocoa for breakfast, and milk with bread and jam at lunch. They took naps in the afternoon. They had a dog. At the end of the winter there was ‘no more snow.’”
    And the cries were those of gulls following a seed plough.

    The people of this world are moving into the next, and with them their hours and the ink of their ability to make thought.
    Particles of light have taken from them
antiphon, asylum, balefire, benediction.
    Snow fell onto her coat and chewen gloves, at night like apple blossoms in tar, and my solace became that she would remain as she was.
    When the house was alive, its walls recorded the rising and falling of the bed, as if a wind—
    The hurrying-forth took with it
casement, casque, chalice.
    So why does it matter
how,
precisely? Behind a curtain in late day with a length of rope. In one of the upper rooms, where a cold rose even when