Archive for the ‘Lise’ Category

1985-08-24

Saturday, August 24th, 1985

Like clouds of smoke that drift across me
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

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1985-08-24 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 —

1985-10-18 Premonition I

Friday, October 18th, 1985

Premonition I

Lise said the other night
that she wasn’t sure why
but she wanted commitment
and it didn’t really matter
if she could explain it
or not.

And tonight when
that gripping aloneness swallowed me
I remembered stories of singles
at Christmas time
and I could feel the truth
in her words.

gallagher
18 Oct 85

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —