In 1994, six years after my husband Raymond Carver’s death, I met Josie Gray. He was the brother of one of my oldest Irish friends, Eileen MacDonagh. In 1986, I’d met Eileen through her youngest sister, Dymphna, who’d been working with me in the “dress circle” of theaters in London, selling programs and chocolates to make a little spare money. At the time, Eileen was raising her four children on the shores of Lough Arrow. My first husband was then in the Vietnam War and I had fled America for England, then Ireland to escape the images of body bags on TV and the sense of a country gone wrong. In fact, one of Eileen’s children, Yvonne, became the first reader of my poems as I drafted them for Under Stars, working in a caravan situated in a field near the Abby Ballindoon — Yeats Country, County Sligo.

Yvonne’s favorite uncle happened to be Josie Gray, though I only learned of Josie after Yvonne’s death many years later. She had passed away at a young age from spinal cancer, leaving behind her husband of one year, along with a bereft family and many friends. Moreover, learning of Josie was inextricably linked to hearing of Yvonne’s death. Josie had caught a beautiful brown trout in Lough Arrow near their home and he had sent the trout down to Dublin where she languished in hospital, unable to eat anything. Her brother Joseph cooked it and carried it to her. She began to eat the fish and she said: “I never tasted anything so good in my life as this trout from Lough Arrow caught by Josie Gray. Tell him for me.”

For me, poems have always been the “brown trout” I’ve tried to send when I wanted to make that intimate connection with myself on behalf of others or with them directly.

It is a small story. Why it haunts me I don’t know. But the magic of the brown trout caught by the favorite uncle and consumed in a hospital room at a time of critical illness moves me. It marks the way in which we try to give the thing we can to make an intimate connection with our beloveds when they need it most.

For me, poems have always been the “brown trout” I’ve tried to send when I wanted to make that intimate connection with myself on behalf of others or with them directly. After Yvonne’s death, I wrote a poem for her that was used on her memorial card. Josie with his trout, me with my poem — ways to accompany Yvonne at a distance. Ways further to make a sign that space and presence can be collapsed, can be transformed through such gifts, through the right gesture, through art.

After our meeting in Ireland, Josie visited me in the Northwest in 1994. He was not a painter at that time. But he was an excellent storyteller, and I began immediately to try to make a written form for his stories. Dan Bourne saw fit to publish some of these in Artful Dodge, and they were subsequently published in Doubletake and The Bellingham Review.

Oil Spot
BY Josie Gray
READ Tess Gallagher’s Poem

When I first met Josie there was the sense that he loved to make discoveries, an ingenuity of spirit that was searching for its form. I took note of his pure enjoyment of light on water, of flowers in the garden, of sky shiftings, of light shattering through clouds, even glowery days that refused rain but hooded us with expectation. He delighted in intensities of color. His eye was hungry, deep, curious, pensive.

Out of these observations came my remark to him one day that he should “try painting.” Little did I know that these two words would launch us into a collaborative venture that would enlarge both our private intimacy and our public, artistic reach. Indeed, along with welcoming and encouraging the paintings as well as finding galleries to show the work, both in Ireland and America, I also helped to title them.

Now, it is sixteen years since Josie began to paint, exploring oil on board and canvas, watercolor and gauche. He settled on this last medium because it allows intensity of color combined with water-based mobility and the possibility to “build up” an effect. And there has been an effect. From the first Josie has had access to “something” as Nick Miller, a British painter in Ross’s Point, put it — a something that goes beyond what many painters who’d gone to school could offer.

At times, Josie’s self-taught landscapes invite us to name them in various unexpected ways, even in Irish, which Josie had grown up hearing from his grandparents. He’d even learned some at school, though half-heartedly. Usually, the phrases were drawn from a phrase book I’d picked up during my travels and sojourns in Ireland since 1968. But other times our titles might come from Japanese words and phrases or even Zen concepts such as with “Moon’s Rainbow Body” — the Rainbow Body being the scant remains (hair and fingernails) of a fully evolved (but usually unassuming) Buddhist practitioner, who at their death returns to the elements in a blast of light, leaving only remnants.

Moon’s Rainbow Body
BY Josie Gray
READ Tess Gallagher’s Poem

“Moon’s Rainbow Body” came from something I was reading — from Cave in the Snow about Tenzen Palmo, the English Buddhist nun. But many titles seemed to spring spontaneously out of the paintings themselves. “My Unopened Life” (which appeared in The New Orleans Review) might be one such painting — in which two childlike trees squire each other in a storybook twilight, as if in long conversation at the rim of a hill. This painting in fact became the first to invite me to accompany it with a poem, the verbal arena of the title “My Unopened Life” not only serving to awaken the painting for the viewer, but also leaving behind an invitation for the poem to come. It seemed in this case as if the instant the title came to us I knew I would write it. It was only a matter of finding the time. The poem was waiting. All I had to do was begin and it seemed to write itself. I made very few changes in the drafting.

Although “My Unopened Life” does not mention the painting’s companion trees, their silent commerce with me helped to generate the poem that in turn tries to open the negative spaces around a lived life — those lives we did not open, or in Frostian terms: the road not taken. My poem “Heart-Mirror” (appearing in the collection, American Zen: A Gathering of Poets) also shows the complicated way in which Josie’s images evoke a response through my poems, the piece only coming home to Josie’s painting at the end where a “rubbed clean heart” can for once get what it wants: “this child’s moon/ and three sentinel lovers.” Here, the poem seems not related to the painting in a frontal way, but veers toward it as exclamation, in the mystery of a child’s moon flanked by three “guardian lovers”.

The idea of a heart-mirror comes from my Buddhist readings. A heart-mirror is an inner place into which we gaze in meditation to see what our heart “looks like” spiritually. Although Josie is Roman Catholic and only knows some fragments of Zen ideas from me, in the naming process his paintings have indeed begun to admit my own preoccupations. But it’s not just a matter of me deciding. Each painting has to “accept” its title and we might reject thirty other titles to arrive at the one selected. Not only do we both have to agree, the painting itself must “agree”. We prop it before us and glance back and forth at the painting, at each other. We try to dismiss each title, but ultimately we will accept a title on the painting’s behalf, one the painting seems to receive.

Then Jeff Fraga, who began showing Josie’s work a couple of years ago at Fraga Gallery on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, Washington, saw my poems inspired by Josie’s paintings and encouraged me to write more. This then became the theme of the first show at the gallery. I wrote out my poems by hand and they appeared in frames beside Josie’s paintings. We repeated their side-by-side appearance again in March 2005 at Fraga Gallery. People really seemed to love reading poems based on paintings, Jeff told me. They would remain in the red alcove of the gallery until you began to wonder if something had happened to them when they didn’t reappear.

Besides “Moon’s Rainbow Body,” other collaborations include “Emanation of the Red Child,” whose naming proceeded from my exclamation on first seeing the painting — that the red splotch in the water-like area below a green bank of color seemed to “emanate” a mysterious human energy in the wild thrown-away-lost of the painting.

Emanation of the Red Child
BY Josie Gray
READ Tess Gallagher’s Poem

Josie and I then began to discuss “emanation” and what a strange word it was, looking it up in the dictionary and marveling that without evidence — with only feeling — such a word had been coined to indicate a field of power flung off an object or presence. A particulate radiation of influence.

We agreed the floating red could be a child. An emotional ground seemed to be forming, and when I went to the painting again, the poem just sprang lyrically from it. This poem seemed to be joy-riding me along with it. Each time I referred to the painting, I came away with an inrushing sense of this red child. Again, my Buddhist readings about the nature of being in a body, of being born, comes into the poem. A breathless plunging drives the poem’s rhythms, whereas the painting seems tranquil and still. And the complementary red-green of the painting seemed edgy and reciprocal at the same time.

Lady Betty
BY Josie Gray
READ Tess Gallagher’s Poem

Josie’s painting of a stalwart tulip conjured up the name “Lady Betty,” since it felt like a personage — a someone who’d withstood much and still held herself upright. We had just been in Ireland where I’d read about Lady Betty who’d been reprieved at the Roscommon Jail when she’d agreed to serve as the hangman when none was available. She herself had been accused of murder and been ready for the gallows. According to one source she’d killed her husband and in another, her son. I began to imagine how the town must have regarded her. This narrative grew from facts turned legend, then reimagined in the poem as I considered what it must have been like to escape death only to be made use of in this fashion in the destinies of others.

For me, there seems a slightly haughty, ironic feel to the commerce between the tulip painting called “Lady Betty” and my poem. I entered a suppositional use of the facts, testing what might have been as well as what I knew from history. Josie might have been less forgiving of Lady Betty than I — but we both agreed hers was a story one couldn’t forget, a killer made use of by the punishment system to do exactly what she’d been found guilty of doing: killing. The fact of this being a woman added another dimension in a time when women were chattel and no refuge for abused women existed. Whether she was actually abused by her husband, however, I don’t know. I conjecture this from the times, from the likelihood of womens’ circumstances during that period.

But these are just quick sketches of the ways in which Josie’s paintings and my poetic responses have struck up a dialogue. In every case, however, the direction of the arrow always proceeds from painting to poem and not the other way. Josie discovers his paintings in the colors and shapes of his imagination, and our naming is a process of rediscovering and even reinventing what has occurred.

Josie discovers his paintings in the colors and shapes of his imagination, and our naming is a process of rediscovering and even reinventing what has occurred.

A hum of magic, of something mysterious always attends these collaborations, like the trout in the instant before it bites the hook. I feel the paintings pulling words from me, creating worlds. I’m with Josie on the Lough Arrow of our imaginations — catching the beautiful brown trout to be sent in our stead to those waiting in a far room, maybe needing just what the conjoined arts of painting and poetry can give, and allowing these unknown people to feel that other such joinings are not simply possible, but are probable because of the fresh energy art originates when it allows, then celebrates, a collaboration between not just arts but artists — the shuttle action of art infusing life and vice versa.