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Poet's Sampler:
Rosanna Warren Introduces Linda Gregerson
LINDA GREGERSON's stanzas strain sentences at their joints, and her diction invites
us to crack open words for the etymological marrow within. Hers is a poetry that
at every juncture -- of syntax with line, of narrative with extended metaphor
-- commands the stressful participation of the reader. No sweet elisions here,
no slot machine phrases: every line break ("God's god-/forsaken children...",
"words dis-/encumbered of contingency . . .") urges us toward an understanding
born of breakage, and intent on healing. It is a poetry of deep attention, finding
its linguistic and moral order in a broken world, in the very heart of the old
curse, "God's wounds/which failures of attention made." -- Rosanna
Warren
Good News
- 1.
- The hobbled, the halt, the hasten-to-blame-it-on-
- childhood
- crowd, the undermined and over-
their-heads, the hapless,
- the humbugs,
- the hassle-me-nots. The night
before the night my uncle Jens
- saw Jesus
- standing in the hayloft, he -
- my uncle Jens, that is - considered
- cashing the whole
- thing in. Bettina gone
the way she had, the boys all gone
- to hell . . .
- The mild flat light of evening lay
- like a balm on the fields. But for his heart
- no balm
- in sight. So Jens
gave all his money to the local charis-
- matic,
- and in exchange his fellow faithful told him
to forgive himself. God's god-
- forsaken children
- all over the suburbs and the country-
side are dying in the service
- of a market
- share. Witness
the redhead I used to go to college with,
- who played
- the trombone and studied Kant and now
performs the laying on of hands somewhere
- in eastern
- Tennessee. Beneath her touch
- quenched sight returns, the myelin sheath
- repairs
- and lets the wheelchair rust, the cancerous
- cat comes purring back to health.
- But Jens,
- whose otherworldliness imperfectly
- cohered, took to driving his pickup
- off the road,
- in desultory fashion for the most part,
- so that cousin Ollie's cornfield took
- the brunt
- of harm. The hens
- ran loose. And Jens, who in his mother's arms
- had leapt
- for joy and in tow-headed youth had leapt
- to favor in each tender heart, went weary
- to salvation.
- 2.
- Having learned from a well-meaning neighbor
- that death
- will not have her if Jesus
- does first, my three-year-old daughter
- is scouring
- the visible world for a sign.
- The other she's found in abundance -
- death on her
- dinnerplate, death in the grass -
- and drawing just conclusions is beside herself
- with fear.
- "Most Englishmen,"
- the Archbishop said smoothly, "are still residual
- Christians.
- We still need a clergy for funerals."
- The televangelist's plexiglass pulpit,
- the crystal veil
- of his tears, assure us the soul is
- transparent too. No stone can break
- nor scandal mar
- the radiant flow of video con-
- version. Close now, closer
- than audio
- enhancement, the frictionless
- story that washes us clean.
- Words dis-
- encumbered of contingency,
- of history, of doubt. God's
- wounds,
- they swore, the old ones,
- the believers, as now we swear by sex or shit.
- God's wounds,
- which failures of attention made.
Saints' Logic
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.
Sold
1.
"The delicious part," he said, "is when
I get her
to strip the bed. This is after my opening
number: she's vacuumed the livingroom carpet
with whatever
she's been using till now,
and I've run the electrolux over it once and come up
with a fistful
of dirt, God's truth - we use
white linen filters and she's watched
me put
a new one in. The woman is amazed.
But the part I love is the bedroom:
she strips
the linens off the bed, suspicious, you see,
but amused, and I run the hose
with the curtain
attachment over the mattress, taking
my time. And when I'm done - are you
ready for this? -
the filterbag that was empty and white
when we began is full. Full! Eighty percent
of household dust
is skin cells, I tell her, you shed them
while you sleep. And mites. And here's
the best:
I empty it out right there on the mattress and she
is about to lose it for real. Don't do that! she says
in a horrified
voice, and I say, Why not? It was there
before. Well, you can imagine - she doesn't so much
as wait
until her husband's home from work.
She's written the check out before I can pack."
2.
He was beloved by my friend of the classical
learning,
who slummed and aspired and quoted the ancients
by pinning his heart on a beauty
so frank
and underemployed. I was the wife. The other
wife really, which may be why I so adored
the vacuum cleaner
salesman's talk. This isn't to say I was ever
ill-treated. Never, not once. Just under-
employed.
And frightened as one is then
of the world and its regard. When they decided
to live apart,
the young one had us to dinner once
on his own, but I had to search through all
my old
addressbooks just now to retrieve
his name. He had a gift for wit that worked
at no
one else's expense. I haven't
quite caught it, it being a gift I don't
myself
possess. Good will resistant to imposture.
My heart was set from then on
on the kind
he carried door to door.
Ann Arbor and Good News (c) 1990 by the Modern Poetry Association. Reprinted by
permission of the Editor of Poetry and the author. Saint's Logic first appeared
in Grand Street.
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