Gregerson - Prodigal: new and selected poems, 1976-2014

Copyright 2015 by Linda Gregerson All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. www.hmhco.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-544-30167-2 Cover design by Jackie Shepherd Cover art Becky Kisabeth Gibbs e ISBN 978-0-544-30168-9
v1.0915 K. A. Gregerson19542014

The Kenyon Review: The Wrath of Juno (A wandering husband), Heliotrope, The Dolphins, The Wrath of Juno (Its the children) The New Yorker: Ceres Lamenting Poetry: Sostenuto, The Weavers Poetry Review (London): Pythagorean Raritan: Font, And Sometimes Fire in the Conservatory was first published by Dragon Gate Press. The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, Waterborne, and Magnetic North were first published by Houghton Mifflin Company. The Selvage was first published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Kind thanks to my editors: Gwen Head, Peter Davison, Pat Strachan, Janet Silver, Michael Collier, Jenna Johnson. To David Baker and Rosanna Warren, astute counselors. To Steven Mullaney, first reader and occasional (reluctant) persona in these poems. To Emma and Megan. And to my sister Karen.

Night. 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, theres only so much air to go around. Theyre makingmore people, my father would say, but nobodys making more land. When my daughters were little and played in their bath, they invented a game whose logic largely escaped me something to do with the disposition of bubbles and plastic ducksuntil I asked them what they called it. They were two and four. The game was Oil Spill. Keeping the ducks alive, I think, was what you were supposed to contrive, as long as you could make it last. Up here in borrowed air, in borrowed bits of heat, in costly cubic feet of steerage were a long held note, as when the choir would seem to be more than human breath could manage.

In the third age, says the story, they divided up the earth. And that was when the goddess turned away from them.

(Echo) A wandering husband peopling the earth with my humiliations which the narrative requires. At least I shall never be out of work. Im not immune to loveliness myself, in fact, especially in the warmer months, so much of it on display: the young ones in their pretty summer dresses and their open shoes, new crops of them every year. I simply think the better choice, what makes for dignity all round, is not to touch.

But try telling that to a man who thinks hes a shower of gold. What mystifies me, truly, are the ones who guard the door. Nothing at stake but vague contempt for playing-it-all too-straight. Youll have heard the girls affliction cant stop talking, cant say anything original was something I did to her after the fact. But look where she started.

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 youd 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. 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 youd 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 wasnt 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 shed already taught us how to read.

At the foot of the download anchored among the usual flotsam of ads, this link: to plastics-express.com who for a fraction of the retail price can solve my underground drainage woes, which tells me the software has finally run amok. Because the article, you see, recounts the rescue from a sewage pipe of Baby 59, five pounds, placenta still attached, in Zhejiang Province, where officials even as I read are debating the merits of throwing the mother in jail. Communal toilet. Father nowhere to be found. The gods in their mercy once could turn a frightened girl to water or a shamed one to a tree, but they no longer seem to take our troubles much to heart.

And so the men with hacksaws do their gentle bestconsider the infant shoulders, consider the lids and this one child among millions, delivered a second time to what we still call breathable air, survives to pull the cords of sentiment and commerce. Dont make the poem too sad, says Megan, thinking at first (we both of us think) the child must be a girl or otherwise damaged, thus (this part she doesnt say) like her. Who is the ground of all I hope and fear for in the world. Wholl buy? Or as the hawkers on the pavement used to put it, What dyou lack? The download comes with pictures too. Of workmen, wrenches, bits of shattered PVC, and one for whom the whole of itcommotion, cameras, IV needle in the scalp is not more strange than ordinary daylight. Welcome, Number 59.

Heres milk from a bottle and heres a nearly human hand.

You think these powers began with you? We were men before this happened. We could run and stand. We couldnt drink the water but we built the ships that made it link us up: salt-rich head of family to your query strings and URLs. Why, having charted the heavens, should we bother with the gods? The boy was a deliberate trap, I see that now. The delicate bridge between shoulder and breastbone.

The not-quite-having-wakened bit of stagger when he walked. And tears, that lovely pooling at the lower lid the instant before they dropped and then the dropping, when he saw how far from shore wed come. And all of it staged, so he could watch the panic when our hands began to flatten into flippers. Is there something you love about yourself? Some here I-am-articulate? And then to lose it, joint by joint. Its that that left me with this rictus of a mouth and with the thing he no doubt flatters himself by calling understanding.

(the house of Cadmus) Its the children nail your heart to the planet, so thats how you nail them back. (the house of Cadmus) Its the children nail your heart to the planet, so thats how you nail them back.

Alcmena in labor for seven days. Think of the man who thought up the goddess who thought of that. And pregnant Semele, stupid with pride, consumed by the flames she had the gall to ask for, though I ought to have known that wouldnt be the end of it.

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