Like clouds of smoke that drift across me— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —
these days … and those to come.
Love and feelings like warm rain
saving me from the empty summer’s heat.
Lise is here … with me in the mist
my hand in hers, our feelings one.
Time and our mortality, smoke and dust
we stand silently amid the moving fog.
We look, we wait, patient and fragile
against our future
and what will become of ‘us’.
gallagher
24 August 1985
Archive for 1985
1985-08-24
Saturday, August 24th, 19851985-08-24 August 24.85
Saturday, August 24th, 1985 August 24.85
When it's all over; when I'm dead; when my ashes
have been scattered over Bullocks, I'll still be around.
Recorded for posterity in the circonvolutions of a
computer's memory. Categorized under LB 1984, 85 and
surely a bit of 86. I'll be between RG. and KA., KM., and
GO., the ones I forgot and the ones I don't know about.
Slices of my life crossing his. Words trying to transcend
feelings, green characters on a gray screen.
I wonder who will stumble onto those files. I
wonder how much will transpire of the love, passion and
magic that hangs in the air just now as I think of him.
Perhaps it will all seem very pale compared to the
poems of years to come and those of earlier years when his
passion was burning out of control; for others.
I'll be a small contribution, a shiny raindrop who
fed him the water of life. He's grown so much through
women. They gave him love and pain, ecstasy and agony.
They pushed him to the limit, backed him into corners,
they ate him up alive and he loved them all.
And I owe them. The ones I read about with a knot
in my stomach, and the shadows, beautiful unknowns whose
influence I can only feel. He's their legacy to me. Each
of them a chapter in the book of his life.
But now he's mine to hold for a moment. And the
added sum of his experiences comes through. My gentle
lover, knowing, tender, strong.
Yet, already he's getting ready to leave me. And
I will send him away with tears in my eyes, a heart ready
to break and pain in my soul and body.
And for all the others who will hold him, I've
made him richer, I've left my mark. They will owe me too;
and they won't know the price of loving him until it's too
late; like me.
- about Gallagher's women.
- on a Saturday afternoon he's
spending with his wife.
— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —
1985-09-01
Sunday, September 1st, 1985We think we are so smart,— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —
that we finally understand the nature of things.
This has been an enduring illusion,
one that seems to move with us through time.
In pre-scientific cultures mental illness
was often explained in terms of spirit possession.
At some point in our recent past
we came to believe that our science could explain everything.
And while this view may draw us ultimately to a clearer truth
it is fraught with dangers we always seem blind to.
The assumptions we make
that go unrecognized
give us distortions like Freud
and his original sin; sex.
And from such fraudulent beginnings
we evolve schemas of thought;
of logic and precedence
based on smoke.
And, even if we do manage to begin from solid ground,
we can and do fall prey to reification
and end up believing
our laws are the reality.
Like children, we are just beginning to think
and like children who begin too many projects
beyond their attention span
we leave many thoughts half thought.
So what does the future hold?
What other illusions will we stumble through,
full of pride at our small learnings
and convinced, at each moment,
that we have most of the big picture and only lack
the fine details.
We are still convinced that what science can describe
encompasses everything
and we are still blind to the truth
that no matter how much we know
we are always still moving
the small light of our knowledge
thru an ever greater darkness
gallagher
1 September 85