Willingly

By Tess Gallagher b. 1943 Tess Gallagher

When I get up he has been long at work,

his brush limber against the house.

Seeing him on his ladder under the eaves,

I look back on myself asleep in the dream

I could not carry awake. Sleep

inside a house that is being painted,

whole lifetimes now only the familiar cast

of morning light over the prayer plant.

This “not remembering” is something new

of where you have been.

What was settled or unsettled in sleep

stays there. But your house

under this steady arm is leaving itself

and you see this gradual surface of

new light covering your sleep

has the greater power.

You think now you felt brush strokes or

the space between them, a motion

bearing down on you—accumulation

of stars, each night of them

arranging over the roofs of entire cities.

His careful strokes whiten the web,

the swirl of woodgrain blotted

out like a breath stopped

at the heart. Nothing has changed

you say, faithlessly. But something has

cleansed you past recognition. When

you stand near his ladder looking up

he does not acknowledge you,

and as from daylight in a dream you see

your house has passed from you

into the blessed hands of others.

This is ownership, you think, arriving

in the heady afterlife of paint smell.

A deep opening goes on in you.

Some paint has dropped onto your shoulder

as though light concealed an unsuspected

weight. You think it has fallen through

you. You think you have agreed to this,

what has been done with your life, willingly.

Tess Gallagher, "Willingly" from Amplitude: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1987 by Tess Gallagher. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org

Source: Willingly (Graywolf Press, 1984)

Biography

Poet, essayist, and short story writer Tess Gallagher was born in 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington, to a logging family. Her early years were marked by the rhythms of seasonal work, as well as the landscape of both the Northwest and the Ozarks, where her grandparents lived. “I don’t know how many children really get to explore vast amounts of territory like that,” she has said in interviews. “It builds something in you.” . . .

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