Tess Gallagher | Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Tess Gallagher

Friends, I’m leading a FREE creative writing workshop via Zoom this coming Friday, March 20, 1-4 pm Central Time. Rewriting the Story, Reclaiming the Self is designed for anyone living with the memories of abuse: bullying, domestic violence, an emotionally abusive relationship, a sexual or physical assault. I’d love to see you in the room. Email me if you’d like to sign up.

Sort through blackberries. Pick out ones too far gone and toss them into a compost pail. Next to you other volunteers bag mushrooms, sort apples, count boxes of organic greens and other donated supplies. How many people will this one afternoon of work feed? Not enough, you think, and suddenly your blackberry task seems so dumb. Futile.

When your own government seems bent on destroying everything you’ve worked for your whole life, when people you didn’t elect and despise are dropping bombs on little kids, are swinging their heedless wrecking balls against everything you hold dear, how can you feel anything but despair?

That’s how they want you to feel, Alison, you tell yourself, for the thousandth time, and you look up from the blackberries, around the big room filled with people working steadily to help others, to take care of them when the people who control the money won’t. This is the flip side of the brutality coin. This is what you have to remind yourself of, every day, all day.

Most of us don’t want to cut down the nests. Keep going, you tell yourself, and you do.

Choices, by Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

(for Drago Štambuk)

Click here for more information about poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher. Today’s poem appears in her collection Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, published in 2011 by Graywolf Press.

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Poem of the Week, by Tess Gallagher

Posted on May 31 by alisonmcghee

Last fall I thinned and divided some of the daisies and phlox and coneflowers and lilies and peonies in my gigantic flower garden. I tried to do such a careful job, but this spring the daisies and some of the coneflowers didn’t come back, and neither did the lavender, which I left undisturbed. I’ve planted delphiniums and coneflowers in their place, but I’m in mourning, as if by disrupting their natural growth I set something unintended in motion.

Choices, by Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

(for Drago Štambuk)

Poem of the Week, by Tess Gallagher

Posted on November 16, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Shack, view straight up from the hammock Years ago I bought some raw land on a slope in Vermont. Hired someone to grade a tiny cleared patch in the woods. Drilled a well. Bought a one-room cabin kit off eBay and hired a carpenter to put it together. Spent many days and nights staring up from the porch and the hammock at the enormously tall pines pictured to the right.

The cabin was a seasonal place but even in summer it was always dark and cool. After some years I craved sunlight, so I asked a lumberjack friend if he would cut down a few of the pines. He said yes, if he could do it in the middle of winter. I don’t like to cut down trees, he said, even though he was a lumberjack. And I only do it in winter, when all the birds have left the nests.

When I read this poem I thought of him, my lumberjack friend who snowshoed alone up the unplowed dirt road to the cabin in February, towing his chainsaw and axe on a toboggan behind him, and went to work in the frozen stillness so he wouldn’t hurt the birds.

Choices, by Tess Gallagher

for Drago Štambuk

For more information on Tess Gallagher, please click here.