Ring
Not the one he’s wearing in that stopped length
of ground, but the one we saw together
in the little shop in Oregon—moss agate so green
it was nearly black on its silver band. Hard
to come across it after, emptied of his hand
and watchful. Thinking to surprise its power
with treason, I gave it to our friend who wore
no rings and needed its luck. But soon I knew,
don’t ask me how, the ring
lay among lesser things in a drawer. I asked
for it back, and for a while, wore it on a chain
around my neck. But it was awkward
like a high-school charm, the sign of love a girl
outgrows—not as it was, exchanged for the rose-gold
of wedding bands. Where is it now?
In some abject safety.
But where? Put away. I turn the house upside down
searching. Not to find it—worse
than omen. Like happiness squandered in fountains
with wrongheaded wishing. Or the hit-and-miss
taunt of memory, its dulled signature so casual
it crushes me lucid and I believe what I don’t believe
in the way of true apparitions—that he uses
my longing to call himself to me,
that my senses are inhabited like the log
into which a bear has crawled to dream
winter a way, that the ongoing presence of the dead
is volatile, sacramental. The wind he’s
attached to—that boy, running with a kite over
the gravestones, looking up, keeping his footing
as if he worked sky into the earth with
a cool boldness. So the dead-aliveness of my love
turns in the flux of memory, of what his memory
would recall, as he is recalled
to a street in Oregon, dead and alive in love,
with the strangeness of cold silver
close around the finger on his new-made hand.
Copyright Credit: Tess Gallagher, "Ring," from Moon Crossing Bridge. Copyright © 1992 by Tess Gallagher. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press.
Source: Moon Crossing Bridge (Graywolf Press
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