Linda Gregerson

When love was a question, the message arrived
in the beak of a wire and plaster bird. The coloratura
was hardly to be believed. For flight,
...

Dark still. Twelve degrees below freezing.
Tremor along
the elegant, injured right front
...

For Karen

I think you must contrive to turn this stone
on your spirit to lightness.
...

Linda,
said my mother when the buildings fell,

before, you understand, we knew a thing
about the reasons or the ways
...

Emanuel de Witte, 1653 [?]
And you, friend, in a footnote, thanked
for kindly
inspecting the date “under magnification,” who
...

It had almost nothing to do with sex.
The boy
in his corset and farthingale, his head-
...

A kind of counter-
blossoming, diversionary,

doomed, and like
the needle with its drop
...

As when, in bright daylight, she closes
her eyes
but doesn’t turn her face away,
...

If the English language was good enough for Jesus
Christ, opined
the governor of our then-most-populous
...

is doing her usual for comic relief.
She doesn’t
see why she should get on the boat, etc.,
...

The world's a world of trouble, your mother must
have told you
that. Poison leaks into the basements
...

Love the drill, confound the dentist.
Love the fever that carries me home.
Meat of exile. Salt of grief.
This much, indifferent
...

In payment for those mornings at the mirror while,
at her
expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied
...

Coinage of the not-yet-wholly-
hardened custodians of public
health, as health is roughly measured
 in the rougher parts of Dearborn.
...

So door to door among the shotgun
shacks in Cullowhee and Waynesville in
our cleanest shirts and ma’am
and excuse me were all but second
...

The world's a world of trouble, your mother must
have told you
that. Poison leaks into the basements

and tedium into the schools. The oak
is going the way
of the elm in the upper Midwest—my cousin

earns a living by taking the dead ones
down.
And Jason's alive yet, the fair-

haired child, his metal crib next
to my daughter's.
Jason is one but last saw light five months ago

and won't see light again.

·

Leaf against leaf without malice
or forethought,
the manifold species of murmuring

harm. No harm intended, there never is.
The new
inadequate software gets the reference librarian

fired. The maintenance crew turns off power one
weekend
and Monday the lab is a morgue: fifty-four

rabbits and seventeen months of research.
Ignorance loves
as ignorance does and always

holds high office.

·

Jason had the misfortune to suffer misfortune
the third
of July. July's the month of hospital ro-

tations; on holiday weekends the venerable
stay home.
So when Jason lay blue and inert on the table

and couldn't be made to breathe for three-and-a-
quarter hours,
the staff were too green to let him go.

The household gods have abandoned us to the gods
of juris-
prudence and suburban sprawl. The curve

of new tarmac, the municipal pool,
the sky at work
on the pock-marked river, fatuous sky,

the park where idling cars, mere yards
from the slide
and the swingset, deal beautiful oblivion in nickel

bags: the admitting room and its stately drive,
possessed
of the town's best view.

·

And what's to become of the three-year-old brother?
When Jason was found
face down near the dogdish—it takes

just a cupful of water to drown—
his brother stood still
in the corner and said he was hungry

and said that it wasn't his fault.
No fault.
The fault's in nature, who will

without system or explanation
make permanent
havoc of little mistakes. A natural

mistake, the transient ill-will we define
as the normal
and trust to be inconsequent,

by nature's own abundance soon absorbed.

·

Oak wilt, it's called, the new disease.
Like any such
contagion—hypocrisy in the conference room,

flattery in the halls—it works its mischief mostly
unremarked.
The men on the links haven't noticed

yet. Their form is good. They're par.
The woman who's
prospered from hating ideas loves causes

instead. A little shade, a little firewood.
I know
a stand of oak on which my father's

earthly joy depends. We're slow
to cut our losses.
...

When love was a question, the message arrived
in the beak of a wire and plaster bird. The coloratura
was hardly to be believed. For flight,

it took three stagehands: two
on the pulleys and one on the flute. And you
thought fancy rained like grace.

Our fog machine lost in the Parcel Post, we improvised
with smoke. The heroine dies of tuberculosis after all.
Remorse and the raw night air: any plausible tenor

might cough. The passions, I take my clues
from an obvious source, may be less like climatic events
than we conventionalize, though I've heard

of tornadoes that break the second-best glassware
and leave everything else untouched.
There's a finer conviction than seamlessness

elicits: the Greeks knew a god
by the clanking behind his descent.
The heart, poor pump, protests till you'd think

it's rusted past redemption, but
there's tuning in these counterweights,
celebration's assembled voice.
...

It had almost nothing to do with sex.
The boy
in his corset and farthingale, his head-

voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin
was not
and never had been simply in our pay. Or

was it some lost logic the regional accent
restores?
A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant

laborer playing Thisby botching
similes
and stop our hearts with wonder. My young friend

he's seven—touched his mother's face last night
and said It's
wet and, making the connection he has had

to learn by rote, You're sad.
It's never
not like this for him. As if,

the adolescents mouth wherever California spills
its luminous
vernacular. As if, until

the gesture holds, or passes. Let's just
say
we'll live here for a while. O

habitus. O wall. O moon. For my young
friend
it's never not some labored

simulacrum, every tone of voice, each
give, each
take is wrested from an unrelenting social

dark. There's so much dark to go around (how
odd
to be this and no other and, like all

the others, marked for death), it's a wonder
we pass
for locals at all. Take Thisby for instance:

minutes ago she was fretting for lack of a beard
and now
she weeps for a lover slain by a minute's

misreading. Reader, it's
sharp
as the lion's tooth. Who takes

the weeping away now takes delight as well,
which feels
for all the world like honest

work. They've never worked with mind before,
the rich
man says. But moonlight says, With flesh.
...

Isabella Whitney, The maner of her Wyll, 1573


1

We're told it was mostly the soul
at stake, its formal

setting-forth, as over water,
where, against all odds,

the words-on-paper make
a sort of currency, which heaven,

against all odds, accepts.
So Will, which is to say, May what

I purpose, please, this once, and what
will happen coincide.

To which the worldly
dispositions were mere after-thought:

your mother's ring and so forth. What
the law considered yours

to give. Which in the case of
women was restricted—this was

long ago, and elsewhere—so
that one confessedly "weak

of purse" might all the more
emphatically be thought of as having little

to say. Except about the soul. The late
disturbance in religion

having done that much, the each
for each responsible, even a servant,

even the poor. Wild, then—quite
beyond the pale—to hustle

the soul-part so hastily off
the page. And turn, our Isabella Whitney,

to the city and its faithlessness. Whose
smells and sounds—the hawker's cry,

the drainage ditch in Smithfield—all
the thick-laid, lovely, in-your-face-and-nostrils stuff

of getting-by no woman of even the slightest
affectation would profess to know,

much less to know so well.
As one would know the special places on

his body, were the passion merely personal.


2

Wattle and brickwork. Marble and mud.
The city's vast tautology. No city

without people and no people but
will long for what the city says they lack:

high ceilings, gloves and laces, news,
the hearth-lit circle of friendship, space

for solitude, enough to eat.
And something like a foothold in the whole-of-it,

some without-which-not, some
little but needful part in all the passing-

from-hand-to-hand of it, so
every time the bondsman racks his debtor or

the shoemaker hammers a nail or one un-
practiced girl imagines she

has prompted a look of wistfulness,
a piece of it is yours because

your seeing it has made it that much slower
to rejoin the blank

oblivion of never-having-
been. The year was fifteen hundred seventy-

three. The year of our Redeemer, as
they used to say. That other

circuit of always-in-your-
debt. From which she wrested, in her open

I-am-writing-not-for-fun-but-for-the-money
way of authorship, a world

not just of plenty but—and here's
the part of that's legacy—of love.
...

is doing her usual for comic relief.
She doesn't
see why she should get on the boat, etc.,

etc., while life as we know it hangs by a thread.
Even God
has had one or two great deadpan lines:

Who told you (this was back at the start—
the teeth
of the tautology had just snapped shut) Who

told you you were naked? The world
was so new
that death hadn't been till this minute

required. What makes you think (the
ground
withers under their feet) we were told?

The woman's disobedience is good for
plot,
as also for restoring plot to human

scale: three hundred cubits by fifty
by what?
What's that in inches exactly? Whereas

all obstinate wife is common coin.
In
the beginning was nothing and then a flaw

in the nothing, a sort of mistake that amplified, the
nothing
mistranscribed (it takes such discipline

to keep the prospect clean) and now the lion
whelps,
the beetle rolls its ball of dung, and Noah

with no more than a primitive double-
entry audit
is supposed to make it right.

We find the Creator in an awkward bind.
Washed back
to oblivion? Think again. The housewife

at her laundry tub has got a better grip.
Which may
be why we've tried to find her laughable,

she's such an unhappy reminder of what
understanding
costs. Ask the boy who cannot, though

God know's he's tried, he swears
each bar
of melting soap will be his last, who cannot

turn the water off when once he's turned it on.
His hands
are raw. His body seems like filth to him.

Who told you (the pharmacopoeia has
changed,
the malady's still the same) Who told you

you were food for worms?
What
makes you think (the furrow, the fruit)

I had to be told?
...