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All of It Singing

New and Selected Poems

What things are steadfast? Not the birds. Not the bride and groom who hurry in their brevity to reach one another. The stars do not blow away as we do. The heavenly things ignite and freeze. But not as my hair falls before you. Fragile and momentary, we continue. Fearing madness in all things huge and their requiring. Managing as thin light on water. Managing only greetings and farewells. We love a little, as the mice huddle, as the goat leans against my hand. As the lovers quickening, riding time. Making safety in the moment. This touching home goes far. This fishing in the air.

The Girl I Call Alma

The girl I call Alma who is so white is good, isn't she? Even though she does not speak, you can tell by her distress that she is just like the beach and the sea, isn't she? And she is disappearing, isn't that good? And the white curtains, and the secret smile are just her way with the lies, aren't they? And that we are not alone, ever. And that everything is backwards otherwise. And that inside the no is the yes. Isn't it? Isn't it? And that she is the god who perishes: the food we eat, the body we luck, the loose net we throw out that gathers her. Fish! Fish! White sun! Tell me we are one and that it's the others who scar me, not you.

The Chorus Speaks Her Words as She Dances

You are perishing like the old men. Already your arms are gone, your legs filled with scented straw tied off at the knees. Your hair hacked off. How I wish I could take on each part of you as it leaves. Sweet mouse princess, I would sing like a nightingale, higher and higher to a screech which the heart recognizes, which the helpless stars enjoy- like the sound of the edge of grass.

I adore you. I take you seriously, even if I am alone in this. If you had arms, you would lift them up I know. Ah, Love, what knows that?

(How tired and barren I am.) Mouse eyes. Lady with white on her face. What will the world do without you? What will the sea do? How will they remember the almond flowers? And the old man, smiling, holding up the new lamb: whom will he hold it up to? What will the rough men do after their rounds of drinks and each one has told his story? How will they get home without the sound of the shore anymore?

(I think my doll is the sole survivor, my Buddha mouse, moon princess, amputee who still has the same eyes. With her song that the deer sings when it is terrified. That the rabbits sing, grass sings, fish, the sea sings: a sound like frost, like sleet, high keening, shrill squeak. Zo-on-na, Kannon, I hold each side of her deeply affected face and turn on the floor.

This song comes from the bottom of the hill at night, in summer. From a distance as fine as that first light on those islands. As the lights on the dark island which held still while our ship came away. This is the love song that lasts through history. I am a joke and a secret here, and I will leave. It is morning now. The light whitens her face more than ever.)

There She Is

When I go into the garden, there she is. The specter holds up her arms to show that her hands are eaten off. She is silent because of the agony. There is blood on her face. I can see she has done this to herself. So she would not feel the other pain. And it is true, she does not feel it. She does not even see me. It is not she anymore, but the pain itself that moves her. I look and think how to forget. How can I live while she stands there? And if I take her life what will that make of me? I cannot touch her, make her conscious. It would hurt her too much. I hear the sound all through the air that was her eating, but it is on its own now, completely separate from her. I think I am supposed to look. I am not supposed to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail and all expression gone. My God, I think, if paradise is to be here it will have to include her.

The Beckett Kit

I finally found a way of using the tree. If the man is lying down with the sheep while the dog stands, then the wooden tree can also stand, in the back, next to the dog.

They show their widest parts (the dog sideways, the tree frontal) so that being next to each other they function as a landscape. I tried for nearly two months to use the tree. I tried by putting the man, standing of course, very far from the sheep but in more or less the same plane. At one point I had him almost off the table and still couldn't get the tree to work. It was only just now I thought of a way.

I dropped the wooden sheep from a few inches above the table so they wouldn't bounce. Some are on their backs but they serve the same as the ones standing. What I can't get over is their coming right inadvertently when I'd be content with any solution.

Ah, world, I love you with all my heart. Outside the open window, down near the Hudson, I can hear a policeman talking to another through the car radio. It's eleven stories down so it must be pretty loud. The sheep, the tree, the dog, and the man are perfectly at peace. And my peace is at peace. Time and the earth lie down wonderfully together.

The blacks probably do rape the whites in jail as Bill said in the coffee shop watching the game between Oakland and Cincinnati. And no doubt Karl was right that we should have volunteered as victims under the bombing of Hanoi.

A guy said to Mishkin, "If you've seen all that, how can you go on saying you're happy?"

The Poet Goes About Her Business for Michele (1966-1972)

Michele has become another dead little girl. An easy poem. Instant Praxitelean. Instant seventy-five-year-old photograph of my grandmother when she was a young woman with shadows I imagine were blue around her eyes. The beauty of it. Such guarded sweetness. What a greed of bruised gardenias. Oh Christ, whose name rips silk, I have seen raw cypresses so dark the mind comes to them without color. Dark on the Greek hillside. Dark, volcanic, dry and stone. Where the oldest women of the world are standing dressed in black up in the branches of fig trees in the gorge knocking with as much quickness as their weakness will allow. Weakness which my heart must not confuse with tenderness. And on the other side of the island a woman walks up the path with a burden of leaves on her head, guiding the goats with sounds she makes up, and then makes up again. The other darkness is easy: the men in the dreams who come in together to me with knives. There are so many traps, and many look courageous. The body goes into such raptures of obedience. But the huge stones on the desert resemble nobody's mother. I remember the snake. After its skin had been cut away and it was dropped, it started to move across the clearing. Making its beautiful waving motion. It was all meat and bone. Pretty soon it was covered with dust. It seemed to know exactly where it wanted to go. Toward any dark trees.

Different Not Less

All of it changes at evening equal to the darkening, so that night-things may have their time. Each gives over where its nature is essential. The river loses all but a sound. The bull keeps only its bulk. Some things lose everything. Colors are lost. And trees mostly. At a time like this we do not doubt our dreams. We believe the dead are standing along the other edge of the river, but do not go to meet them. Being no more powerful than they were before. We see this change is for the good, that there is completion, a coming around. And we are glad for the amnesty. Modestly we pass our dead in the dark, and history-the Propylaea to the right and above our heads. The sun, bull-black and ready to return, holds back so the moon, delicate and sweet, may finish her progress. We look into the night, or death, our loss, what is not given. We see another world alive and our wholeness finishing.

Trouble in the Portable Marriage

"What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor?"

We walk the dirt road toward town through the clear evening. The sky is apricot behind the black cane. Pink above, and dull raspberry on the Turkish hills across the water. The Aegean is light by the shore, then dark farther out. I cannot distinguish now which is light and which is color. I go up the road on my bicycle, floating in the air: the moon enlarging and decreasing, moving all the time close to my head. I stop at the bridge. Get off and sit on the rail because I remember I have no money. After a while you come. Your hand touches me and then withdraws. We talk about why the moon changes size, and I think how I'd smelled it. Like sweet leaf smoke, like sweet wood burning. We go toward town together, me riding and you walking. Feeling the silk and paleness of the air. No one passes us the whole length of the road.

Classicism

The nights are very clear in Greece. When the moon is round we see it completely and have no feeling.

Whole and Without Blessing

What is beautiful alters, has undertow. Otherwise I have no tactics to begin with. Femininity is a sickness. I open my eyes out of this fever and see the meaning of my life clearly. A thing like a hill. I proclaim myself whole and without blessing, or need to be blessed. A fish of my own spirit. I belong to no one. I do not move. Am not required to move. I lie naked on a sheet and the indifferent sun warms me. I was bred for slaughter, like the other animals. To suffer exactly at the center, where there are no clues except pleasure.

Growing Up

I am reading Li Po. The TV is on with the sound off. I've seen this movie before. I turn on the sound just for a moment when the man says, "I love you." Then turn it off and go on reading.

Summer in a Small Town

When the men leave me, they leave me in a beautiful place. It is always late summer. When I think of them now, I think of the place. And being happy alone afterwards. This time it's Clinton, New York. I swim in the public pool at six when the other people have gone home. The sky is gray, the air hot. I walk back across the mown lawn loving the smell and the houses so completely it leaves my heart empty.

No More Marriages

Well, there ain't going to be no more marriages. And no goddam honeymoons. Not if I can help it. Not that I don't like men, being in bed with them and all. It's the rest. And that's what happens, isn't it? All those people that get littler together. I want things to happen to me the proper size. The moon and the salmon and me and the fir trees, they're all the same size and they live together. I'm the worse part, but mean no harm. I might scare a deer, but I can walk and breathe as quiet as a person can learn. If I'm not like my grandmother's garden that smelled sweet all over and was warm as a river, I do go up the mountain to see the birds close and look at the moon just come visible, and lie down to look at it with my face open. Guilty or not, though, there won't be no postcards made up of my life with Delphi on them. Not even if I have to eat alone all these years. They're never going to do that to me.

Eurydice

I linger, knowing you are eager (having seen the strange world where I live) to return to your friends wearing the bells and singing the songs which are my mourning. With the water in them, with their strange rhythms. I know you will not take me back. Will take me almost to the world, but not out to house, color, leaves. Not to the sacred world that is so easy for you, my love.

Inside my mind and my body is a darkness which I am equal to, but my heart is not. Yesterday you read the Troubadour poets in the bathroom doorway while I painted my eyes for the journey. While I took tiredness away from my face, you read of that singer in a garden with the woman he swore to love forever.

You were always curious what love is like. Wanted to meet me, not bring me home. Now you whistle, putting together the new words, learning the songs to tell the others how far you traveled for me. Singing of my desire to live.

Oh, if you knew what you do not know I could be in the world remembering this. I did not cry as much in the darkness as I will when we part in the dimness near the opening which is the way in for you and was the way out for me, my love.

The Defeated

I sat at the desk for a while fooling with my hair and looking at the black birds on the bakery roof. Pulled the curtain, put my hair back, and said it's time to start. Now it's after three. You are still on the bus, I guess, looking out the window. Sleeping. Knowing your defeat and eating lunch part by part so it will last the whole journey.

I heard there are women who light candles and put them in the sand. Wade out in dresses carrying flowers. Here we have no hope. The pregnant woman has the abortion and then refuses to speak. Horses stall in their strength, whitening patches of air with their breath. There will be this going on without them. Dogs bark or five birds fly straight up to a branch out of reach.

I had warm pumpernickel bread, cheese and chicken. It is sunny outside. I miss you. My head is tired. John was nice this morning. Already what I remember most is the happiness of seeing you. Having tea. Falling asleep. Waking up with you there awake in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice. I'll try to tell you better when I am stronger.

What does the moth think when the skin begins to split? Is the air an astonishing pain? I keep seeing the arms bent. The legs smashed up against the breasts, with her sex showing. The weak hands clenched. I see the sad, unused face. Then she starts to stand up in the opening out. I know ground and trees. I know air. But then everything else stops because I don't know what happens after that.

Too Bright to See

Just before dark the light gets dark. Violet where my hands pull weeds around the Solomon's seals. I see with difficulty what before was easy. Perceive what I saw before but with more tight effort. I am moon to what I am doing and what I was. It is a real beauty that I lived and dreamed would be, now know but never then. Can tell by looking hard, feeling which is weed and what is form. My hands are intermediary. Neither lover nor liar. Sweet being, if you are anywhere that hears, come quickly. I weep, face set, no tears, mouth open.

The Apparent

When I say transparency, I don't mean seeing through. I mean the way a symbol is made when an X is drawn over O. As the world moves when it is named. In the sense of truth by consciousness, which we translate as opposites. The space we breathe is also called distance. Presence gives. Absence allows and calls, until Presence holds the invisible, weeping. Transparent in the way the heart sees old leaves. As we become more like the hills by feeling. I mean permanence. As when the deer and I regard each other. Ah, there was no fear then. When she went with her young from the meadow back into the nearly night of the woods, it was because the rain came down suddenly harder.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from All of It Singing by Linda Gregg Copyright © 2008 by Linda Gregg. Excerpted by permission.
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