Friday's reading assignment.

Read the poems and then write a paragraph answering ONE of these questions:

1. Linda Gregerson is masterful in her use of the line. Look at the stanza form of one of the poems and explain how it affects the way you read the poem, that is, the way you accumulate knowledge and understanding as you go through the poem from one line to the next.

2. Choose one of the poems and explain the literal situation: what is going on? What part of the poem is about the speaker's thoughts and what is about the situation the speaker is a part of or is observing?The _New York Times Book Review_ said, "Gregerson's poems face the hard questions of living head-on." Choose one of the poems and explain which "hard questions of living" it represents.


Poems by Linda Gregerson
Over Easy
Cloud cover like a lid on.
Thwarted trees. And three more hours
of highway to be rid of. My darlings don’t want
a book on tape. They want
a little indie rock, they want to melt
the tweeters, they want
mama in the trunk so they can have some un-
remarked-on fun.
Fine. I’ve got my window, I can contemplate
the flatness of Ohio. I can think
about the ghastly things we’ve leached into
the topsoil, I can marvel that the
scabrous fields will still accept the plow. Except
some liquid thing is happening just behind
the trees, some narrow sub-
cutaneous infusion where
the darkening earth and darker strato-
cumulus have not yet sealed
their hold. A pooling
fed by needle drip: pellucid, orange,
a tincture I would almost call unnatural were
it not so plainly nature-
born. Till what had been a stricken contiguity
of winter-wasted
saplings starts to sharpen and distill, as though
a lens had been adjusted or a mind
had cleared. Our sorry dispersal,
the Bishop of Africa wrote
to his flock, but the voice of a child
recalled me. When the girls were small
we took them to an island once, the sun
above the sea, and with
the other paying customers we’d watch it set.
A yolk, I thought. The not-yet-
torn meniscus with its cunning corrective to
up and down. You’ve held
one in your palm no doubt: remember the weight?
Remember the lemony slickness we so oddly
called “the white” and how it drains
between your fingers? Not
in chambering and wantonness the sun would swell
nor strife and plumply flatten like
a yolk-in-hand. Would steep there in the salt-
besotted vapors till
we must have been watching an aftereffect,
so quickly did it vanish. Till
the whole of expectation, wrote the bishop—this
Ohio sky, the road, my noisy
darlings—is exhausted and—
now mandarin, madder—what was
the future—cinnabar, saffron, marigold,
quince—becomes the past.

Prodigal

Copper and ginger, the plentiful
mass of it bound, half loosed, and
bound again in lavish
disregard as though such heaping up
were a thing indifferent, surfeit from
the table of the gods, who do
not give a thought to fairness, no,
who throw their bounty in a single
lap. The chipped enamel—blue—on her hails.
The lashes sticky with sunlight. You would
swear she hadn’t a thought in her head
except for her buttermilk waffle and
its just proportion of jam. But while
she laughs and chews, half singing
with the lyrics on the radio, half
shrugging out of her bathrobe in the
kitchen warmth, she doesn’t quite
complete the last part, one of the
sleeves—as though, you’d swear, she
couldn’t be bothered—still covers
her arm. Which means you do not
see the cuts. Girls of an age—
fifteen for example—still bearing
the traces of when-they-were-
new, of when-the-breasts-had-not-
been-thought-of, when-the-troublesome-
cleft-was-smooth, are anchored
on a faultline, it’s a wonder they
survive at all. This ginger-haired
darling isn’t one of my own, if
own is ever the way to put it, but
I’ve known her since her heart could still
be seen at work beneath
the fontanelles. Her skin
was almost otherworldly, touch
so silken it seemed another kind
of sight, a subtler
boundary than obtains for all
the rest of us, though ordinary
mortals bear some remnant too,
consider the loved one’s fine-
grained inner arm. And so
it’s there, from wrist to
elbow, that she cuts. She takes
her scissors to that perfect page, she’s good,
she isn’t stupid, she can see that we
who are children of plenty have no
excuse for suffering we

should be ashamed and so she is
and so she has produced this many-
layered hieroglyphic, channels
raw, half healed, reopened
before the healing gains momentum, she
has taken for her copy-text the very
cogs and wheels of time. And as for
her other body, says the plainsong
on the morning news, the hole
in the ozone, the fish in the sea,
you were thinking what exactly? You
were thinking a comfortable
breakfast would help? I think
I thought we’d deal with that tomorrow.
Then you’ll have to think again.


Spring Snow
A kind of counter-
blossoming, diversionary,
doomed, and like
the needle with its drop
of blood a little
too transparently in
love with doom, takes
issue with the season: Not
(the serviceberry bright
with explanation) not
(the redbud unspooling
its silks) I know I’ve read
the book but not (the lilac,
the larch) quite yet, I still

have one more card to
play. Behold
a six-hour wonder: six
new inches bedecking the
railing, the bench, the top
of the circular table like
a risen cake. The saplings
made (who little thought
what beauty weighs) to bow
before their elders.
The moment bears more
than the usual signs of its own
demise, but isn’t that
the bravery? Built
on nothing but the self-
same knots of air
and ice. Already
the lip of it riddled
with flaws, a sort
of vascular lesion that
betokens—what? betokens
the gathering return
to elementals. (She
was frightened
for a minute, who had
planned to be so calm.)
A dripline scoring
the edge of the walk.
The cotton batting blown
against the scree begun

to pill and molt. (Who
clothed them out of
mercy in the skins
of beasts.) And even
as the last of the
lightness continues
to fall, the seepage
underneath has gained
momentum. (So that
there must have been a
death before
the death we call the
first or what became
of them, the ones
whose skins were taken.)
Now the more-
of-casting-backward-than-of-
forward part, which must
have happened while I wasn’t
looking or was looking
at the skinning knives. I think
I’ll call this mercy too.