The Poet Goes About Her Business

By Linda Gregg b. 1942 Linda Gregg

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.

Linda Gregg, “The Poet Goes About Her Business” from Too Bright to See. Copyright © 1981, 2002 by Linda Gregg. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

Source: Too Bright to See (Graywolf Press, 1981)

Biography

Born in New York, poet Linda Gregg was raised in Marin County, California. She received both a BA and an MA from San Francisco State University. Gregg has published several collections of poetry, including Too Bright to See (1981); Alma (1985); Things and Flesh (1999), finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; and All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems, a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2008 and winner of the . . .

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