The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)

I look up from lunch and see a guy dozing back in his chair
and I imagine my dead father that way, perpetual sleeping passenger,
his head full of roads. “And who cares,” he says in his dream,
“that since you’ll never wake, that you’re not inscribing memories?”
Describing a hallucination means you’re describing it
to someone, so who’s to say this isn’t part of the hallucination?
My odometer hit 123456 today and I had a minor celebration
and took a picture. They say as much about the idea of time
as they do the idea of reality, most recently in the mechanism
through which birds see the earth’s magnetic field. It’s a kind
of blue. I like that. Everyone you know is suddenly an art student.
Or how families have a recurring theme, generation to generation.
Measure the shoulders. Measure a taste for parsley. Hand tremors.
As in the Enquists vs the Gormans. The Enquists want the baby,
the child, as he’s three now, spring 1968, to be adopted out
through their side of the family to the Gallahers, and the Gormans
want to keep it in Portland, maybe cut a deal
over where it is and when. The Enquists sign the papers, though,
and the child is off on a Continental jet with a golden tail
to Kansas. (The painting keeps folding that we’re working on,
fretting along the edges of the frame.) A few weeks later,
the Gormans are still not taking it well. For them, it was
a kidnapping, and one, the mother, goes off somewhere,
and the father, the Enquist, goes looking for her
with some friends. One, driving, July 8, falls asleep,
and they cross the median, down the hillside, into the trees.
You fall asleep over this life, and you wake
in a doll playground in a doll town surrounded by a doll
forest. You’re planning some sort of festival.
The Enquists and the Gormans understand each other,
as a desert understands rain. As now, 50 years later,
they’ve all gone but for the mother and the child,
and he finds her one day in late fall, and she asks him
if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.

--John Gallaher                                       first published in LIPS, as "Golden (23)"

Though I’ve always known he died in a car wreck, I didn’t know until recently that my birth-father died in his sleep. Likewise, I’ve always known I was adopted (at age three), but the circumstances, as well as my birth-mother’s name, were a mystery, until I found her recently. I’ve been trying, since my book, In a Landscape (BOA 2014), to find a way to write as I’m thinking, to try to write the thinking itself, the imagination, but in a non-fiction landscape. From Lyn Hejinian, I think of it as thought transference, or articulating the inarticulate. Ashbery talks about this as well, describing it as a project reflecting how the mind works, the play of thought. I like these ideas, keeping in mind O’Hara’s directness (“I did this I did that”) and Miles Davis playing what the day presents. I’m not sure if any of this makes much sense to anyone but me, which is why I hesitate to put too fine a point on it.
--John Gallaher

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

John Gallaher’s tribute to origins, “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” shares the breathless energy of Frank O’Hara’s elegy, “The Day Lady Died,” and its trajectory from the circumstantial to the transcendent. “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday” . . . “I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun / and have a hamburger and a malted. . ,” while the poet-speaker of “Garden of Mirrors” looks “up from lunch. . .” and imagines his dead father, “perpetual passenger, his head full of roads.” O’Hara records his lunch-hour movements; Gallaher celebrates his car’s 123456th mile. O’Hara’s bank teller’s name, “Miss Stillwagon,” is part of his day’s momentousness, along with “NEW WORLD WRITING,” “Verlaine,” “Bonnard,” “Strega,” and “Gauloises.” (Lady, not pinned to her daylight name, enters the poem via photograph.) Gallaher describes the navigation of birds, their precise jazz of vision, “a kind of blue”; linking it to a family’s serial mirroring: a set of shoulders, “a taste for parsley.” Then we hear, in third person, the story of his divided parentage, related as Enquists vs. Gormans—recalling Faulkner’s Snopes and Compsons, discordant tribes. Suddenly, the poem mirrors itself, registers the strain exacted by the telling, the difficulty of keeping the story within bounds: “(The painting keeps folding that we’re working on, / fretting along the edges of the frame.)” The father goes looking for the mother “with some friends.” He drives, then sleeps, and all disappear “down the hillside, into the trees,” dispatched in two phrases with the killing loveliness of a Hemingway title. At poem’s end the son has found the mother, “in late fall,” is with her in the way that Frank is with Lady Day at the 5-Spot: “while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”(no end-stop). Art pre-empts time. John Gallaher’s “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” collapses fifty years as the mother asks her son “if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.”
--Angela Ball

(The New York School Diaspora will be on sabbatical till Tuesday, 31 August, when it will return as a biweekly feature.)

Comments

[Karen Beckworth]

Thank you for this wonderful post. Looking forward to 31 August and more of your NY School Diaspora series.

[David Lehman]

An admirable post. Beautiful (from John's poem): "The Enquists and the Gormans understand each other, / as a desert understands rain." And this insight (from Angela's commentary): "He drives, then sleeps, and all disappear 'down the hillside, into the trees,' dispatched in two phrases with the killing loveliness of a Hemingway title."

[Bruce Book]

Very nice all around, especially since I have found myself in the desert for 30 years now - while idly watching so much trail away in the dry dust, out through a hole which it is too late to stopper. BB