No One Knows Alone

Spending my childhood
memorizing product logos
particular purple of a wine gum
golden donut font
recounting the plot of last night's
commercials, so after
three decades there's no room left
for names of weeds in back
of our property

Much of knowing is forgetting
Dōgen says to know the self
is to forget the self
Forgetting the self
we are illuminated
by the ten thousand things

Particular purple of comfrey
once called knitbone
for healing deep inside

Zoë you taught me
how to know death
it's like knowing your lungs
not an out-there concept
but air on a cold morning
the tightness of grief
knowing by doing

Your death week
a storm came through
late October light
exposing just how temporary
the world can be

Sure, cats still crossed
the vacant lot and all that
leaves in the wind
vibrating beneath us
the hum of an empty infinite
and it was in my lungs
your ghost not yet returned
from its first voyage

Another year, the Perseids
stream past behind clouds
I wait in the dark
for a clarifying wind
head back, noticing how
various the flavors
of being alone

My lost year I call it, being
a being caught in time
finding my way towards
solitude accompanied
by the season's music

Is it always North,
where the silence is?

No one knows alone

Deer show me the fog
rising each morning off
the banks of the Kennetcook
Barn swallows sky writing
I am jealous of elegance

Stevie says she never saw
an animal in the wild
feeling sorry for itself

Every week I walk back
to the racoon, guts opened
by coyote, to watch its fur
dissolve. Pain becomes
a skull becomes a path

Knowing is a ritual
the body follows

Every October I drink
a little more, rage
in long evenings
memories of the light
that turned the world
transparent

Rituals are the way
we recognize being illuminated
by ten thousand flickering things
the way we find
for a time
how to forget
the self we knew

Eating in Silence

Cancer lets you look at death a long time
crab in the shell

I wait in the field furrows
hard winter clod underfoot

Standing over the broth, pot of bones
wind outside, then snow

“Would you take a small bowl?”

She would, the house a pressure
alongside our tenderness

I offer my daughter squash for her first meal

she is disgusted

wanting it before she is ready
or ready before she is able

these waning months
an end approaches

“where are you going, senior monk?” asked Jizo
“I am on pilgrimage, wandering
with the wind” said Hogen

She would lie on the couch
and us around her
a skeleton slowly, via the lungs

opening the squash, tangle of seeds
sweet flesh smell
they like to interbreed, forming cucapumpkin
an abundant vine

toxic growth of a cell

our baby, small fingers
forcing cooked cubes through both palms

“what is pilgrimage?” said Jizo
“I don't know” said Hogen
“Not knowing
is most intimate”

In the morning around her bed
watching her troubled breathing slow

windows open to February
how clean, the chill

fingers tight on sheets

bird leaves the tree

pulse underground
I do not feel but sense

She crawls through the kitchen
searching for stray crumbs
to feast on

I sit zazen every day, and I sit with a group once a week. Once a month we sit for a whole day, and twice a year we sit for a week. I've been sitting like this for the past eleven years, first in Toronto and now in Lunenburg.

Ben Gallagher is a poet and essayist currently living between Toronto, Ontario and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. He is in the middle of a PhD at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, researching non-linear pedagogy and poetic practices in community poetry workshops. He recently became a father, and spends large portions of his day happily stacking blocks and picking up cereal from under the high chair.

More on Ben Gallagher’s work can be found on our Links page.