Red Poppy

By Tess Gallagher b. 1943 Tess Gallagher

That linkage of warnings sent a tremor through June

as if to prepare October in the hardest apples.

One week in late July we held hands

through the bars of his hospital bed. Our sleep

made a canopy over us and it seemed I heard

its durable roaring in the companion sleep

of what must have been our Bedouin god, and now

when the poppy lets go I know it is to lay bare

his thickly seeded black coach

at the pinnacle of dying.

My shaggy ponies heard the shallow snapping of silk

but grazed on down the hillside, their prayer flags

tearing at the void—what we

stared into, its cool flux

of blue and white. How just shaking at flies

they sprinkled the air with the soft unconscious praise

of bells braided into their manes. My life

simplified to “for him” and his thinned like an injection

wearing off so the real gave way to

the more-than-real, each moment’s carmine

abundance, furl of reddest petals

lifted from the stalk and no hint of the black

hussar’s hat at the center. By then his breathing stopped

so gradually I had to brush lips to know

an ending. Tasting then that plush of scarlet

which is the last of warmth, kissless kiss

he would have given. Mine to extend a lover’s right past its radius,

to give and also most needfully, my gallant hussar,

to bend and take.

Source: Moon Crossing Bridge (Graywolf Press, 1992)

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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