Archive for 1983

1983-04-03

Sunday, April 3rd, 1983

We talked about Bhagwan and religion today.
She thinks I’m crazy but without malice.
I tried to make the point that he is to religion
what ‘One World’ is to nationalism
Somehow its only the Rolls Royces everyone sees
and I had to confess I don’t understand
that part myself.

I told her that if I couldn’t get time off
I would quit my job to go this summer
and she couldn’t fathom how something
I’m so inactive in
could be so important to me.

I said that in my priorities only she
and the kids came higher.
I tried to ask her how she would feel
if somehow she had come to believe
that Christ had returned…

would it change her life,
that He was existing, available,
in our society?

Would it change mine?
I’m still trying to find out.

I’m going to go again in July and
join the Buddhafield.
Open my heart and eyes to the storm
of history around this man.

Gallagher

3 April 83
S.J.C.


— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1983-04-03

Sunday, April 3rd, 1983

Lying there beside her, I smell her skin, the warmth of her
I see, or imagine, in the gray light, the wrinkles
I've put there and I feel the storm of our lives

She's told me her period's wrong and that her breasts hurt.
For months we've tried to conceive
and come to this.

I put my hand on her back beneath the covers
intimate against her sleeping
I would know her skin anywhere.

I begin to feel age and our mortality.
Even now my body says I press too hard
that I cannot become what I once was.

And she who grows more precious to me each year
grows more ripe for He who reaps us all.
I touch her back and feel her breath ... in this moment.

Gallagher

3 April 83, SJC


— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1983-04-04 586

Monday, April 4th, 1983

586

So we choose what we want to decorate our lives

and then find ourselves in empty rooms

with mocking mirrors and the riddle

of how everything can be just as we wanted it

and yet so utterly empty and unfulfilling

I walk these rooms and wait the clock

twist against frustration and strive to see the truth

but I carry weapons against the deadness;

love and memories, pictures and words

faces and touches, family names

they can’t break me on their pressures

though sometimes they send me out

to stumble blank-eyed

from the wicked press of incomprehension

as long as there are children’s smiles

and a woman’s love

I can survive

04-04-83

Irvine at Pick


— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —