本帖最后由 橙子 于 2017-12-27 11:47 编辑
Blue Hour
for Sean Christophe
by Carolyn Forché
The moon slips from its cerement, and my son, already disappearing into
a man, moves toward his bed for the night, wrapped in a towel of
lake scent.
A viola, night-voiced, calls into its past but nothing comes.
A woman alone rows across the lake. Her life is intact, but what she
thought could never be taken has been taken. An iron bridge railing
one moment its shadow the next.
It is n’y voir que du bleu, it is blind to something. Nevertheless.
Even the most broken life can be restored to its moments.
___________
My son rows toward me against the wind. For thirty-six years, he rows.
In 1886, he is born in Paris.
Bice the clouds, watchet, indigo, woad.
We lived overlooking the cemetery. It was the summer of the Paris
bombings. I walked him among the graves for what seemed hours but
were clouds drifting across marble.
Believing it possible to have back the field in its flowering, my friend has
brought me here, has given ma an open window, the preludes, an
echo of my son’s laughter on the rumpled lake.
Go wherever you can but keep returning to the present.
The human soul weighs twenty-six grams. A cathedral can become
A dovecote.
___________
I was born in America just after the war. My legs grew deformed, and
so they had to be fitted with a special brace.
At night I banged the brace against the wooden crib bars and cried
( so they say) . The cries had to be stopped before I woke “the
entire house.”
___________
In the morning, footsteps, a wind caught between roofs. From the quarry
of souls they come into being: supernal lights, concealed light, light
which has no end.
Everything in the world has a spirit released by its sound.
The room turns white again, and white. For years I have opened my eyes
and not known where I was.
It was like a kettle wrapped in towels and bubbling, spewing camphor
clouds against walls turning the world beyond the windows white.
I couldn’t move, and when they lifted the tented sheet covering the crib
It was only to touch my face.
This was the year my mother’s mother died in the asylum, Eloise.
Mindless. Without protection from the world.
Her hair, white, everywhere, her eyes the windows of a ruined house.
Like a kettle, but made of apothecary glass, so that it was possible to
watch the liquid boil inside.
Sometimes later I would find the suitcase of clippings: walls smeared
with waste, bedsheets mapped in urine, and how later, when Eloise
burned, they were still tied to their chairs.
By later summer, the fields are high with foamflower, fleabane, loosestrife,
mullein, and above these wings like chapel windows.
The first love is also there, running through the field as if he could
escape.
They were in their chairs and in their beds, tied to the bedrails. Some
had locked themselves in the dispensary, as more than the fire they
feared the world.
Here grow bellflower and blind gentian, blue-eyed grass and touch-me-
not. I don’t know who came into that room but spirits also came.
Objects in the room grew small grew large again. The doll laughed like
my mother’s mother.
In every future window their white gowns, a stone ruin behind a sign
forbidding trespass for years to come.
They came into the room and left, and later my mother would suffer the
same emptiness.
In the years just after the war, it was not as certain that a child would
live to be grown. Trucks delivered ice and poured coal into bins below
the houses.
You see, one can live without having survived.
___________
I have returned to Paris: a morning flecked with sparrows, the garret
casements open over the blue-winged roofs.
The two-story windows a spackled fresco of sky.
From the loggia, it is possible to gaze out over the graves. In the armoire,
books, and little paper soldiers fighting the Franco-Prussian War.
At the farm-table many afternoons with the windows open, I conjugated
the future perfect, ivy shivering on cemetery walks, the infant asleep—
How is it possible that I am living here, as if a childhood dream 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 rockmoss 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 noting, 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 I’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.
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发表于 2017-12-27 11:02
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