Spacious Encounter, By TESS GALLAGHER

What they cut away in braids from childhood

returns. I use it. With my body’s nearest silk

I cover you in the dream-homage, attend and revive

by attending. I know very little of what to do

without you. Friends say, “Go on with your life.”

But who’s assigned this complicitous extension,

these word-caressings? this night-river

full of dead star-tremors, amazed floatings, this

chaotic laboratory of broken approaches?

Your unwritten pages lift an ongoing dusk in me.

Maybe this makes me your only reader now. The one

you were writing towards all along,

who can’t put down

her double memory pressed to shape

your one bodiless body. Book I am wearing

in my night-rushing

to overtake these kneelings and contritions

of daylight. Book

that would be a soul’s reprisal

if souls could abandon their secret missions

so necessary to our unbelief. No,

the embrace hasn’t ended.

Though everyone’s grief-clock

runs down. Even mine sweeps

the room and goes forth with a blank face

more suited each day to enduring.

Ours is the compressed altitude

of two beings who share one retina

with the no-world seared onto it, and

the night-river rushing through, one-sided,

and able to carry what is one-sidedly felt

when there is no surface to what flows into you.

Embrace

I can’t empty. Embrace I would know with my arms

cut away on no street in no universe

to which we address so much unprofound silence.

I unshelter you--my vanishing

dialogue, my remnant, my provision.

From “Moon Crossing Bridge” (Graywolf: $17; 99 pp.). Gallagher’s sixth collection of poetry is about coming to terms with her husband’s recent death. She was married to Raymond Carver. 1992 by Tess Gallagher. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.