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
...

1.

The backstory's always of hardship, isn't it?
No-other-choices and hoping-for-better
on foreign shores. A minute ago, as measured

by the sand dunes here, the shipping lanes were thick
with them, from Hamburg, Limerick, towns
along the Oslofjord, and lucky to have found

the work. The Michigan woodlands hadn't been denuded yet
(a minute ago) so one of the routes was
lumber and the other was a prairie's wealth

of corn. There's a sort of cushioned ignorance that comes
of being born-and-then-allowed-to-live-in-
safety so I used to think it must have been more

forgiving here, less brutal than the brutal North Atlantic
with its fathoms and its ice. But no.
The winds, the reefs, the something-to-do-with-

narrower-troughs-between-the-waves and lakes like this
are deadlier than oceans: in
a single year the losses were one in every

four. We come for the scale of it: waters without
a limit the eye can apprehend and—could
there be some mistake?—aren't salt. Dunes

that make us little which if falsely consoling is right and
good. Where commerce lifts its sleeping head.
If I had the lungs for diving I expect I'd be there too

among the lovely broken ribs and keels. Visitors need
a place to sleep and something to fill up the
evenings, it's natural, the people in town

need jobs. Calamity-turned-profit in tranquility. My
father's father's father was among the ones
who did not drown. Who sold his ship

and bought a farm.

2.

What is it about the likes of us? Who cannot take it in
until the body of a single Syrian three-
year-old is face down on the water's edge? Or this

week's child who, pulled from the rubble, wipes
with the back and then the heel of his small
left hand (this time we have a video too) the blood

congealing near his eye then wipes (this is a problem,
you can see him thinking Where?) the hand
on the chair where the medic has put him.

So many children, so little space in our rubble-strewn
hearts. In alternative newsfeeds I am
cautioned (there is history, there is such a thing

as bias) that to see is not to understand. Which (yes, I know,
the poster child, the ad space, my consent-
to-be-governed by traffic in arms) is true and quite

beside the point. The boy on the beach, foreshortened
in the photograph, looks smaller than
his nearly three years would make him, which

contributes to the poignancy. The waves have combed his
dark hair smooth. The water on the shingle, in-
different to aftermath, shines.

3.

There was once, says the legend, a terrible fire or as
some will recount it a famine and
a mother bear with her two cubs was driven

into the lake. They swam for many hours until the
smaller of the cubs began to weaken and,
despite all the mother could do, was drowned,

then the second cub also, so when the mother reached
the shore which then as now belonged
to a land of plenty she lay down with her face

to the shimmering span whose other side was quite
beyond her powers of return. The islands
we call Manitou, the one and then the other, are

her cubs, she can see them, we go to them now by ferry.
And maybe that's what we mean by
recreation, not that everything lost—remember

the people to whom the legend belonged—shall be
restored but that it does us good
to contemplate the evidence. The lake,

the dunes, the broken ships, the larger-than-we-are
skeins of time and substance in which
change might be—we'll think of it so—not

hostile but a kindness..
...

Linda,
said my mother when the buildings fell,

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

and means,
while we were still dumbfounded, still

bereft of likely narratives, we cannot
continue to live in a world where we

have so much
and other people have so little.

Sweet, he said.
Your mother's wrong but sweet, the world

has never self-corrected,
you Americans break my heart.

Our possum—she must be hungry or
she wouldn't venture out in so

much daylight—has found
a way to maneuver on top of the snow.

Thin crust. Sometimes her foot breaks through.
The edge

of the woods for safety or
for safety's hopeful look-alike. Di-

delphis, "double-wombed," which is
to say, our one marsupial:

the shelter then
the early birth, then shelter perforce again.

Virginiana for the place. The place
for a queen

supposed to have her maidenhead.
He was clever.

He had moved among the powerful.
Our possum—possessed

of thirteen teats, or so
my book informs me, quite a ready-made

republic—guides
her blind and all-but-embryonic

young to their pouch
by licking a path from the birth canal.

Resourceful, no? Requiring
commendable limberness, as does

the part I've seen, the part
where she ferries the juveniles on her back.

Another pair of eyes above
her shoulder. Sweet. The place

construed as yet-to-be-written-upon-
by-us.

And many lost. As when
their numbers exceed the sources of milk

or when the weaker ones fall
by the wayside. There are

principles at work, no doubt:
beholding a world of harm, the mind

will apprehend some bringer-of-harm,
some cause, or course,

that might have been otherwise, had we possessed
the wit to see.

Or ruthlessness. Or what? Or heart.
My mother's mistake, if that's

the best the world-as-we've-made-it
can make of her, hasn't

much altered with better advice. It's
wholly premise, rather like the crusted snow.
...

It's another sorry tale about class in America, I'm sure
you're right,
but you have to imagine how proud we were.

Your grandfather painted a banner that hung from Wascher's
Pub
to Dianis's Grocery across the street: Reigh Count,

Kentucky Derby Winner, 1928.
And washtubs filled
with French champagne. I was far too young

to be up at the stables myself, of course, it took
me years
to understand they must have meant in bottles

in the washtubs, with ice.
His racing colors
were yellow and black, like the yellow

cabs, which is how Mr. Hertz first made the money
that built
the barns that bred the horses, bred at last this perfect

horse, our hundred and thirty seconds of flat out earth-
borne bliss.
They bought the Arlington Racetrack then and Jens

got a job that for once in his life allowed him to pay
the mortgage
and the doctors too, but he talked the loose way even

good men talk sometimes and old man Hertz
was obliged
to let him go. It was August when the cab strike in

Chicago got so ugly. Somebody must have tipped
them off,
since we learned later on that the Count

and the trainer who slept in his stall had been moved
to another
barn. I'll never forget the morning after: ash

in the air all the way to town and the smell of those
poor animals,
who'd never harmed a soul. There's a nursery

rhyme that goes like that, isn't there? Never
did us any
harm. I think it's about tormenting a cat.
...

At the foot of the download anchored
among
the usual flotsam of ads,

this link: to plastics-express.com who for
a fraction
of the retail price can

solve my underground drainage woes, which
tells me
the software has finally

run amok. Because the article, you see,
recounts
the rescue from a sewage

pipe of Baby 59, five pounds,
placenta still
attached, in Zhejiang

Province, where officials even as I read
are debating
the merits of throwing

the mother in jail. Communal
toilet. Father
nowhere to be found.

The gods in their mercy once
could turn
a frightened girl to

water or a shamed one to a tree,
but they
no longer seem

to take our troubles much
to heart.
And so the men with

hacksaws do their gentle best—consider
the infant
shoulders, consider the lids—

and this one child among millions,
delivered
a second time to what

we still call breathable air, survives
to pull
the chords of sentiment

and commerce.
Don't make the poem
too sad, says Megan,

thinking at first (we both of us
think) the child
must be a girl or otherwise

damaged, thus (this part she doesn't
say) like her.
Who is the ground

of all I hope and fear for in the world.
Who'll buy?
Or as the hawkers

on the pavement used to put it, What
d'you lack?
The download comes with

pictures too. Of workmen, wrenches,
bits of shattered
PVC, and one for whom

the whole of it—commotion, cameras,
IV needle in the scalp—
is not more strange

than ordinary daylight.
Welcome, Number
59. Here's milk

from a bottle and here's a nearly
human hand.
...

As sometimes, in the gentler months, the sun
will return
before the rain has altogether
stopped and through

this lightest of curtains the curve of it shines
with a thousand
inclinations and so close
is the one to the

one adjacent that you cannot tell where magenta
for instance begins
and where the all-but-magenta
has ended and yet

you'd never mistake the blues for red, so these two,
the girl and the
goddess, with their earth-bred, grassfed,
kettle-dyed

wools, devised on their looms
transitions so subtle no
hand could trace nor eye discern
their increments,

yet the stories they told were perfectly clear.
The gods in their heaven,
the one proposed. The gods in
heat, said the other.

And ludicrous too, with their pinions and swansdown,
fins and hooves,
their shepherds' crooks and pizzles.
Till mingling

with their darlings-for-a-day they made
a progeny so motley it
defied all sorting-out.
It wasn't the boasting

brought Arachne all her sorrow
nor even
the knowing her craft so well.
Once true

and twice attested.
It was simply the logic she'd already
taught us how
to read.
...