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
...

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

Meaning, how many parents,
when things get bad, are wearing
what they've slept in when they come
to pick up the kids at school.

The best of talk, said someone
once, is shop talk: we can go
to it as to a well. But manifolds
and steering racks are going

the way of the wells—offshore—
so the-nifty-thing-you-do-
with-the-wrench-when-the-foreman-
has-sped-the-line-up

has become a ghastly shorthand for
despair among the people
you are paid to help. Despair,
sometimes, of helping. In

the winter dawn a decade and a half
ago, we'd gather around
the school bus stop—the unshaved
fathers, mothers, dogs,

the siblings in their snowsuits—so
the children bound for
Johnson Elementary might have
a proper sending-off.

The privileged of the earth, in our
case: words and stars
and molecules were all our care,
a makeshift village blessed

with time and purpose. And
a school bus stop,
to make it seem like life. By far my
favorites were the Russian

mathematicians: bathrobes hanging
below their parkas, cigarettes
scattering ash, their little ones for the
moment quite forgotten, they

would cover the walls of the shelter
with what
to most of us was Greek but was
no doubt of urgent consequence

for quantum fields. So filled with joy:
their permanent markers on the
brick. And then
the bus, and then the children off

without us and our little human pretext
gone. Fragile the minutes.
Fragile the line between wonder
and woe. The poet when he

wrote about our parents in the garden
gave them love and rest
and mindfulness. But first
he gave them honest work.
...

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

affliction might yield. But how
when the table is God's own board
and grace must be said in company?
If hatred were honey, as even

the psalmist persuaded himself,
then Agatha might be holding
her breasts on the plate for reproach.
The plate is decidedly

ornamental, and who shall say that pity's
not, at this remove? Her gown
would be stiff with embroidery whatever
the shape of the body beneath.

Perhaps in heaven God can't hide
his face. So the wounded
are given these gowns to wear
and duties that teach them the leverage

of pain. Agatha listens with special
regard to the barren, the dry,
to those with tumors where milk
should be, to those who nurse

for hire. Let me swell,
let me not swell. Remember the child,
how its fingers go blind as it sucks.
Bartholomew, flayed, intervenes

for the tanners. Catherine for millers,
whose wheels are of stone. Sebastian
protects the arrowsmiths, and John
the chandlers, because he was boiled

in oil. We borrow our light
where we can, here's begging the pardon
of tallow and wick. And if, as we've tried
to extract from the prospect, we'll each

have a sign to be known by at last—
a knife, a floursack, a hammer, a pot—
the saints can stay,
the earth won't entirely have given us up.
...

1

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

nature now and this one woman comes
to the door she must have weighed
three hundred pounds Would you be
willing to tell us who you plan to vote

for we say and she turns around with
Everett who're we voting for? The
black guy says Everett. The black guy
she says except that wasn't the language

they used they used the word
we've all agreed to banish from even our
innermost thoughts, which is when
I knew he was going to win.


2

At which point the speaker discovers,
as if the lesson were new,
she has told the story at her own expense.
Amazing, said my sister's chairman's

second wife, to think what you've
amounted to considering where you're from,
which she imagined was a compliment.
One country, friends. Where when

we have to go there, as, depend
upon it, fat or thin, regenerate
or blinkered-to-the-end, we shall,
they have to take us in. I saw


3

a riverful of geese as I drove home across
our one-lane bridge. Four hundred of them
easily, close-massed against the current and
the bitter wind (some settled on the ice) and just

the few at a time who'd loosen rank to
gather again downstream. As if
to paraphrase. The fabric
every minute bound

by just that pulling-out that holds
the raveling together. You were driving
all this time? said Steven. Counting
geese? (The snow falling into the river.)

No. (The river about
to give itself over to ice.) I'd stopped.
Their wingspans, had they not
been taking shelter here, as wide as we are tall.
...

Night. Or what


they have of  it at altitude
like this, and filtered
air, what was

in my lungs just an hour ago is now
in yours,
there's only so much air to go

around. They're making
more people, my father would say,

but nobody's making more land.
When my daughters
were little and played in their bath,

they invented a game whose logic
largely escaped me —
something to do with the

disposition
of   bubbles and plastic ducks — until
I asked them what they called it. They

were two and four. The game
was Oil Spill.
Keeping the ducks alive, I think,

was what you were supposed to
contrive, as long
as you could make it last. Up here

in borrowed air,
in borrowed bits of   heat, in costly
cubic feet of  steerage we're
a long

held note, as when the choir would seem
to be more
than human breath could manage. In

the third age, says the story, they
divided up the earth. And that was when
the goddess turned away from them.
...

A kind of counter-
blossoming, diversionary,

doomed, and like
the needle with its drop

of blood a little
too transparently in

love with doom, takes
issue with the season: Not

(the serviceberry bright
with explanation) not

(the redbud unspooling
its silks) I know I've read

the book but not (the lilac,
the larch) quite yet, I still

have one more card to
play. Behold

a six-hour wonder: six
new inches bedecking the

railing, the bench, the top
of the circular table like

a risen cake. The saplings
made (who little thought

what beauty weighs) to bow
before their elders.

The moment bears more
than the usual signs of its own

demise, but isn't that
the bravery? Built

on nothing but the self-
same knots of air

and ice. Already
the lip of it riddled

with flaws, a sort
of vascular lesion that

betokens—what? betokens
the gathering return

to elementals. (She
was frightened

for a minute, who had
planned to be so calm.)

A dripline scoring
the edge of the walk.

The cotton batting blown
against the screen begun

to pill and molt. (Who
clothed them out of

mercy in the skins
of beasts.) And even

as the last of the
lightness continues

to fall, the seepage
underneath has gained

momentum. (So that
there must have been a

death before
the death we call the

first or what became
of them, the ones

whose skins were taken.)
Now the more-

of-casting-backward-than-of-
forward part, which must

have happened while I wasn't
looking or was looking

at the skinning knives. I think
I'll call this mercy too.
...