Tess Gallagher > Quotes

“It's a dangerous mission. You could die out there. You could go on forever.”
― Tess Gallagher

“Don’t move. I like this ledge of loose diamonds
waiting to be spilled into the night.
Let’s shine awhile without touching.
Sensuality is, after all, a river that is always waiting.”
― Tess Gallagher, Moon Crossing Bridge

“So remembering
is only one more way of being alone
when the voice has gone everywhere
in the dusk of the porches
looking for the last thing to say.”
― Tess Gallagher, Instructions to the Double: Poems

“Did you think
a little time and death would stop me?”
― Tess Gallagher, Dear Ghosts,

“That’s what poems are for,
unlivable love."

epigraph to “In Lilac-Light”
― Tess Gallagher, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

“Urgent Story"

When the oracle said, ‘If you keep pigeons
you will never lose home.’ I kept pigeons.
They flicked their red eyes over me,
a deft trampling
of that humanly proud distance
by which remaining aloof
in it’s own fullness. I administered
crumbs, broke sky with them like breaking

the lemon-light of the soul's amnesia
for what It wants but will neither take
nor truh let go. How it revived me,
to release them! And at that moment of flight
to disavow the imprint, to tear
their compass, out by the roots of
some green meadow they might fly over
on the way to an immaculate freedom, meadow

in which a woman has taken off
her blouse, then taken off the man's flannel shirt
in their sky-drenched arc
of one, then the other above
each other's eyelids is a branding of daylight,
the interior of its black ambush
in which two joys lame the earth a while
with heat and cloudwork under wing-beats.

Then she was quiet with him. And he
with her. The world hummed
with crickets, with bees nudging the lupins.
It is like that when the earth counts
its riches—noisy with desire
even when desire has strengthened our bodies
and moved us into the soak of harmony.

Her nipples in sunlight have crossed his palm
wind-sweet with savor and the rest
is so knelt before
that when they stand upright
the flight-cloud of my tamed birds shapes an arm
too short for praise. Oracle, my dovecot
is an over and over nearer to myself
when its black eyes are empty.
But by nightfall I am dark
before dark if one bird is missing.

Dove left open by love in a meadow,
Dove commanding me not to know
where it sank into the almost-night—for you
I will learn to play the concertina,
to write poems full of hateful jasmine and
longing, to keep the dead alive, to sicken
at the least separation.
Dove, for whose sake
I will never reach home.”
― Tess Gallagher, My Black Horse: New & Selected Poems

“Under Stars

The sleep of this night deepens

because I have walked coatless from the house

carrying the white envelope.

All night it will say one name

in its little tin house by the roadside.


I have raised the metal flag

so its shadow under the roadlamp

leaves an imprint on the rain-heavy bushes.

Now I will walk back

thinking of the few lights still on

in the town a mile away.


In the yellowed light of a kitchen

the millworker has finished his coffee,

his wife has laid out the white slices of bread

on the counter. Now while the bed they have left

is still warm, I will think of you, you

who are so far away

you have caused me to look up at the stars.


Tonight they have not moved

from childhood, those games played after dark.

Again I walk into the wet grass

toward the starry voices. Again, I

am the found one, intimate, returned

by all I touch on the way.”
― Tess Gallagher, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

“Last of his toothpaste, last of his Wheat Chex, last
of his 5-Quick-Cinnamon-Rolls-With-Icing, his
Pop Secret Microwave Pop-
corn, his Deluxe Fudge Brownie Mix next to my
Casbah Nutted Pilaf on the sparser
shelf, I'm using it all up. Chanting: he'd-want-me-
to-he'd-want-me-to. To consume loss like a hydra-headed
meal of would-have-dones accompanied by
missed-shared-delight. What can I tell you?”
― Tess Gallagher

“I entered this world not wanting
to come. I'll leave it not
wanting to go. All this while,
when it seemed there were two doors,
there was only one--this
passing through.”
― Tess Gallagher

“Heart, it doesn’t matter. We were only sleeping
to let the poem know where to find us.
Now let it rain. Let the avalanche
of hours we’ve spent apart have their say. Only they
have the power to make these words
bear my heartprint as they fall outside the dream.

— Tess Gallagher, from “Because the Dream Is My Tenderest Arm,” Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2011)”
― Tess Gallagher, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

“Ours is another luster,
as if a soul had died outside the world
and divided itself in two

— Tess Gallagher, from “I Don’t Know You,” Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2011)”
― Tess Gallagher, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

“If you've lived only by reasonableness, well, you have missed the show, haven't you?”
― Tess Gallagher

“Our meditations
waver and recover us, waver
and reel us in to our bodies
like fish willing at last to take on the joy
of being fish, in or out of the water.
When we gather at last at the summit
and sit with him
we know we have moved the mountain
to its top as much as it carried us
deeply into each step.”
― Tess Gallagher

“Heart, you are
only the shell of a confessed desire
wondering what to do next.

— Tess Gallagher, from “Because the Dream is My Tenderest Arm,” Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2011)”
― Tess Gallagher, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

“In daylight we pick up our tinned rations and hike off,
every artery and nerve of us, into the rest
of our commemorative lives.”
― Tess Gallagher