Excerpt from Things and Flesh

THE PRECISION

There is a modesty in nature. In the small
of it and in the strongest. The leaf moves
just the amount the breeze indicates
and nothing more. In the power of lust, too,
there can be a quiet and clarity, a fusion
of exact moments. There is a silence of it
inside the thundering. And when the body swoons,
it is because the heart knows its truth.
There is a directness and equipoise in the fervor,
just as the greatest turmoil has precision.
Like the discretion a tornado has when it tears
down building after building, house by house.
It is enough, Kafka said, that the arrow fit
exactly into the wound that it makes. I think
about my body in love as I look down on these
lavish apple trees and the workers moving
with skill from one to the next, singing.

THE MUCHNESS

She went back,
knowing the way in her marrow.
Trees in leaf but joyless, ceremonial.
Lit with the Underworld's slum light.
A small, ordinary apartment.
Iron heater, remnants
of the heart's quiet,
of the mind's radiance.
A wooden chair and three windows.
Wobbly table in the kitchen,
lily plant on the linoleum.
In the darkest room the bed.
And the trunk open.
She opens the window an inch.
All around her a world that used to be.

WINNING

There is having by having
and having by remembering.
All of it a glory, but what is past
is the treasure. What remains.
What is worn is what has lived.
Death is too familiar, even though
it adds weight. Passion adds size
but allows too much harm.
There is a poetry that asks for
this life of silence in midday.
A branch of geranium in a glass
that might root. Poems of time
now and time then, each
containing the other carefully.

Copyright 1999 by Linda Gregg. All rights reserved.