Linda Gregerson

In payment for those mornings at the mirror while, at her expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied French Braids, for all the mornings afterward of Hush and Just stand still, to make some small amends for every reg- iment- ed bathtime and short-shrifted goodnight kiss, I did as I was told for once, gave up my map, let Emma lead us through the woods “by instinct,” as the drunkard knew the natural prince. We had no towels, we had no “bathing costumes,” as the children’s novels call them here, and I am summer’s dullest hand at un- premeditated moves. But when the coppice of sheltering boxwood disclosed its path and posted rules, our wonted bows to seemliness seemed poor excuse. The ladies in their lumpy variety lay on their public half-acre of lawn, the water lay in dappled shade, while Emma in her underwear and I in an ill- fitting borrowed suit availed us of the breast stroke and a modified crawl. She’s eight now. She will rather die than do this in a year or two and lobbies, even as we swim, to be allowed to cut her hair. I do, dear girl, I will give up this honey-colored metric of augmented thirds, but not (shall we climb on the raft for a while?) not yet.

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, grass- fed, 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.

She dances to the wheeze of my lungs. Were she taller, or had she both hind legs, she would lick my aching knees. There’s nothing like practice I firmly believe. Practice makes the heart grow fond. When the graft heals, you’ve apples on a cherry tree, delicious domestic freaks. I had a splendid grandmother, I might have made her up. She wore cotton dresses, usually blue, and glasses with thin gold frames and plastic cushions for the nose. The plastic was slightly pink, intended to blend with the flesh. She never raised her voice. Her knuckles enlarged, her goiter enlarged. There are ways within ways. A man will go down displaying himself in a nursing home. The mystery left, and there’s more than when we began, has nothing to do with reticence, or safety.

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.

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

1 So door to door among the shotgun shacks in Cullowhee and Waynesville in our cleanest shirts and ma’am and excuseme 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.

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.

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.

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?

If faith is a tree that sorrow grows and women, repentant or not, are swamps, a man who comes for solace here will be up to his knees and slow getting out. A name can turn on anyone. But say that a woman washes the dust from a stranger’s feet and sits quite dry-eyed in front of her mirror at night. The candle flame moves with her breath, as does the hand of the painter, who sees in the flame his chance for virtuosity. She lets him leave her shoulder bare. Bedlam’s distilled from a Mary too, St. Mary’s of Bethlehem, shelter for all the afflicted and weak of mind. The donors conceived of as magi no doubt. The mad and the newborn serve equally well for show. A whore with a heart, the rich with a conscience, the keepers of language and hospitals badly embarrassed at times by their charge. The mirror refuses the candle, you see. And tears on another’s behalf are not the mirrors he’s pleased to regard. Who loves his ironies buxom and grave must hate the foolish water of her eyes.