Blue Hour by Carolyn Forche Page B

the house was shuttered.

    His mother on the porch, dressing like a man even then, and the house in the photograph behind her in flames, mother and house.
    Beneath the ice, open-eyed but absent, she who I was, with ribbon scars faint across her. Every tip of wheat-stalk lit by sun.
    They took with them
communicant, cruet,
and the ability to keep watch. Having lit the night sky, their heaven vanished.
    He needed to feel as if he were going to die, many times to feel it, many hundreds of times.
    It came along and passed beyond. Had I been. Were you not. Because I believed I was alone.
    Until the derelict house offered its last apparition.

    As a star plummets from darkness, a soul is exiled. Light, silk, the rope, black storms of dream.
    That one day he was given a new mother, and it was she who starved them, she who sent them into the wood to cut the very switch—
    So with the rope, as if he could replace the past. A child awakened by a whip. Until his narrow coffin and cup of sleep.
    He was only a boy when the world darkened. But the switches were easy to find, so red in winter.
    The house where one could dance without clothes imagined an invisible piano, stove mice, chimney swallows, a curtain, a cry.
    What may have been the beginning of life after death.

    In the open arms of a burnt wind he returned to me, barefoot by choice, bearing gingerbread, chocolate, quince jam, a bag of candy.
    Look! Whole villages intact and shimmering. The very body itself begins to evanesce, it has not true boundary. Death changes it as a mirror changes a face.
    Then he used the past to refer to the present.
Flour-sacks, school-chalk, a coherent life.
    Wings slap along the wall, and in the hardened owl dung, crickets glint. Dust settles on the house until entire sentences are written.
    A window haunted by an open hand.
Here,
he said, his voice like gauze like grieving.

    Over the writing table, an empty map: years to connect the little marks. In his closet among the linens his weapon of choice.
    In answer to your question, no, he could not have done it. The rope was used for something else, worn from use, a cry a stiffening.
    It was with this he untied himself again and again, in the bed and before the fire, blue-voiced and changed of face.
    The house saw everything as does every house. Hollow walls, staircase, sorrowing ink. It was the last time.
    They had been children in towns years apart, she who I was, and the man in the coroner’s arms.

    Perhaps those born after the war are those whose lives the war took.
    An abandoned house, after all, will soon give itself back, and its walls become as unreadable as symbols on silk.
    With the departed, a sense of time, and sleep even sleep is taken, and the world appears as if it were—
    Every spring I return to her, laying my thoughts to rest like a wreath on water.
    These are the words no longer. Here are the photographs taken when we were alive.

Refuge
    In the blue silo of dawn, in earth-smoke and birch copse, where the river of hands meets the Elbe.
    In the peace of your sleeping face,
Mein Liebchen.
    We have our veiled memory of running from police dogs through a blossoming orchard, and another
    Of not escaping them. That was—ago—(a lifetime), but now you are invisible in my arms, a soul
    Acquiring speech, the body its blind light, whispering
Noli me frangere
even as it is in death shattered.
    We were
one in the other.
When the doves rose at once, and our refuge became wing-light—

Writing Kept Hidden
    The black fire of ink on paper took hold of their souls—incorporeal fire.
    There was no protection this fire couldn’t touch nor darkness nor a moment.
    It lasted as long as a dream it was no dream. Heteroglossia of nervous shortwave, cloud of blown walls.
    In the barracks, those who had sketched themselves in coal and smoke became coal and smoke.
    And the living remained, linking unknown things to the known: residue, scapular, matchlight, name on a tongue.
    Then, for an hour, the war