Linda Gregg

I would like to decorate this silence, but my house grows only cleaner and more plain. The glass chimes I hung over the register ring a little when the heat goes on. I waited too long to drink my tea. It was not hot. It was only warm.

Two horses were put together in the same paddock. Night and day. In the night and in the day wet from heat and the chill of the wind on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging and the taste of bay in the shadowed air. The dignity of being. They slept that way, knowing each other always. Withers quivering for a moment, fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail, width of back. The volume of them, and each other’s weight. Fences were nothing compared to that. People were nothing. They slept standing, their throats curved against the other’s rump. They breathed against each other, whinnied and stomped. There are things they did that I do not know. The privacy of them had a river in it. Had our universe in it. And the way its border looks back at us with its light. This was finally their freedom. The freedom an oak tree knows. That is built at night by stars.

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.

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.

She sits on the mountain that is her home and the landscapes slide away. One goes down and then up to the monastery. One drops away to a winnowing ring and a farmhouse where a girl and her mother are hanging the laundry. There’s a tiny port in the distance where the shore reaches the water. She is numb and clear because of the grieving in that world. She thinks of the bandits and soldiers who return to the places they have destroyed. Who plant trees and build walls and play music in the village square evening after evening, believing the mothers of the boys they killed and the women they raped will eventually come out of the white houses in their black dresses to sit with their children and the old. Will listen to the music with unreadable eyes.

I open the box of my favorite postcards and turn them over looking for de Chirico because I remember seeing you standing facing a wall no wider than a column where to your left was a hall going straight back into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down to where you stood alone and where the room opened out on your right to an auditorium full of people who had just heard you read and were now listening to the other poet. I was looking for the de Chirico because of the places, the empty places. The word “boulevard” came to mind. Standing on the side of the fountains in Paris where the water blew onto me when I was fifteen. It was night. It was dark then too and I was alone. Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t somebody find me all those years? The form of love was purity. An art. An architecture. Maybe a train. Maybe the shadow of a statue and the statue with its front turned away from me. Maybe one young girl playing alone, hearing even small sounds ring off cobblestones and the stone walls. I turn the cards looking for the one and come to Giacometti’s eyes full of caring and something remote. His eyes are loving and empty, but not with nothingness, not for the usual reasons, but because he is working. The Rothko Chapel empty. A cheap statue of Sappho in the modern city of Mytilene and ancient sunlight. David Park’s four men with smudges for mouths, backed by water, each held still by the impossibility of what art can accomplish. A broken river god, only the body. A girl playing with her rabbit in bed. The postcard of a summer lightning storm over Iowa.

Half the women are asleep on the floor on pieces of cardboard. One is face down under a blanket with her feet and ankle bracelet showing. Her spear leans against the wall by her head where she can reach it. The woman who sits on a chair won’t speak because this is not her dress. An old woman sings an Italian song in English and says she wants her name in lights: Faye Runaway. Tells about her grown children. One asks for any kind of medicine. One says she has a rock that means honor and a piece of fur. One woman’s feet are wrapped in rags. One keeps talking about how fat she is so nobody will know she’s pregnant. They lie about getting letters. One lies about a beautiful dead man. One lies about Denver. Outside it’s Thirtieth Street and hot and no sun.

It was a picture I had after the war. A bombed English church. I was too young to know the word English or war, but I knew the picture. The ruined city still seemed noble. The cathedral with its roof blown off was not less godly. The church was the same plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out of the holes God’s fist made in the walls. All our desire for love or children is treated like rags by the enemy. I knew so much and sang anyway. Like a bird who will sing until it is brought down. When they take away the trees, the child picks up a stick and says, this is a tree, this the house and the family. As we might. Through a door of what had been a house, into the field of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.

His heart is like a boat that sets forth alone on the ocean and goes far out from him, as Aphrodite proceeds on her pleasure journeys. He pours the gold down the runnels into a great mystery under the sand. When he pulls it up by the feet and knocks off the scale, it is a god. What is it she finds with those men that equals this dark birthing? He makes each immortal manifest. The deities remain invisible in their pretty gardens of grass and violets, of daffodils and jasmine. Even his wife lives like that. Going on yachts, speaking to the captains in the familiar. Let them have it, the noons and rain and joy. He makes a world here out of frog songs and packed earth. He made his wife so she contains the green-fleshed melons of Lindos, thalo blue of the sea, and one ripe peach at five in the morning. He fashioned her by the rules, with love, made her with rage and disillusion.

All that is uncared for. Left alone in the stillness in that pure silence married to the stillness of nature. A door off its hinges, shade and shadows in an empty room. Leaks for light. Raw where the tin roof rusted through. The rustle of weeds in their different kinds of air in the mornings, year after year. A pecan tree, and the house made out of mud bricks. Accurate and unexpected beauty, rattling and singing. If not to the sun, then to nothing and to no one.