#debora greger

[honeybeebutch]

The Origin of Birds - Nicole Callihan // Eve - Savana Ogburn // Adam's Ribs - Jensen McRae // Creation of Eve - Lorenzo Maitani // Briar Rose - Debora Greger

[the-final-sentence]

The past had been ironed flat, a thousand leaves starched and pinned to a cottonwood just a shade of its former self,   the only sound its rustle, industrious, leaves turning waxen, unread— though no shelf lay empty in the library of the dead.

Debora Greger, from “The Vacant Lot at the End of the Street”

[allyourprettywords]

“The Dictionary of Silence,” Debora Greger

And in that city the houses of the dead are left empty, if the dead are famous enough; by day the living pay to see if dust is all      that befalls the lives they left behind.      Coating even the glassed-in waistcoat in time, coloring the air of the room stripped bare, down four stories of twisted stair it falls,      down on the dictionary no longer there.      Empty your pockets, empty your hearts, that empty upper room exhorts. Forget the scrap of paper with the missing word      for what’s missing—      go home to your rented room. Go on. Six cramped quills, one elbow chair, missing a leg, held up all those years by Johnson’s willing it to hold      his bulk—now even the “soul hath elbowroom”      in that room where scribes scribbled out that quote. In that city the dead never want to get up, just as in life. What can we offer them?      Just this dust to cover them deeper,      kin to the soot that shadowed their days. Kiss from a wife who no longer wanted to be touched— love, he held, regarded with passionate affection,      like one sex to the other, first; or, second,      made do with the affection of a friend; or managed merely parental tenderness, third; or, fourth, no more than pleasure with, delighting in; or, fifth,      no less than the reverent unwillingness to offend.      O had a long sound, as in alone. Her opium. On clean-shirt day he would pay a visit to his wife. Pack meant large bundle of any thing—“on your head      a pack of sorrows.”      Quiet. The square just off Fleet Street so quiet Carlyle got lost on his way there. Remember the garret floorboards’ complaint, the muffled      ruffling of pigeons just overhead?      Such silence we fell into stair by stair, the house to ourselves. Tired of London, he claimed, and one was      tired of life. Were we just tired?      Under the low ceiling as below deck, up where no angle was true, we sank in deeper silence, valedictory, the way it took us in.      Volumes of ancient air closed around us, blank,      weighted by the latest dust. What had we come to the house of the dead to see? Something exotic? The zebra presented to the queen in 1726? Something      exactly as it might have been? Did you      yawn first, back among the living? You pulled me from traffic rushing downstream instead of up, that Zambezi best forded from stripe to painted stripe,      a “zebra crossing.” I’d looked the wrong way.

[violettesiren]

I walk into the thicket of my family, for a photograph, thinking, who would find me here? The snow on the east face of the hill, in the last light, burns like a cheek. The moon, its thinnest, begins to burn too. I offer it as small comfort, in my absence.

Another morning without sun. The geese I heard on waking, moving from river to wheatfield, flew above the clouds. I spend the morning in the attic looking for something to abandon. You would laugh at this. You call again to ask why I'm not with you.

I tell you how I found a place, just over the hill that edges this town, where I was all that stood between ground and sky. I felt cloudlike, lying low for a season.

I tell you a dream. Across the white fields of winter you come, long shadow, looking for something in the snow, a woman in a white dress. You bring a shirt the color of sagebrush in spring, which you've never seen. Your face is the color of sand. A bad connection, static all that's between us. I think of you as the horizon. I think of you.

White Fields by Debora Greger

[violettesiren]

Down some long, unseen staircase of air the plane bumped, and we were through with cloud. On the sky floor was laid the desert of childhood, a Christmas train set gathering dust. The last of the snow

clung to the north of every little rise toy cars drove around past clumps of sagebrush, past tumbleweeds stuck to chain-link fence, another record crop. How long till the chinook? I don't want to be wakened,

lost in my old single bed, by the warm wind I always forget I know by heart. Winter sunrise sketching a briefly rosy day— I don't want it to reveal the return of the lawn, scraggly, pale, sporting the first bloom,

a long-lost mitten whose mate's gone missing. Snowmen brought to their knees— how quickly the spring I always seem to bring from the underworld bores. Boys I went to school with, shedding their hats and coats— they've fattened or lost hair, or both.

From ancient stables to upstart shopping mall their daughters flock. To her well-stocked feeder, Mother attracts birds on their way farther north, calling me by my sister's name to see the rare such-and-such,

anther little bird in brilliant camouflage, the shades of dirt. Canada geese have claimed the first tender shoots, tuft by devoured tuft. The dogwoods of the underworld are shivering by now, petals snowier than snow,

the jaded hands of palm fronds clapping. The crimson tedium, acid-sweet, that marries seed from seed—I want the upper world to freeze, outlined in frost at once delicate and witheringly accurate, want wild pomegranates

the sweetly unreasoning red of stoplights to flare their ripeness beside the road. I want to taste again that moment in the underworld I touched its fruit. I want us to stop, my mother and me,

though I'll have a flight to catch, the plane to shadow the River Styx where it trail though northern Florida, fair the tailwind in the ferryman's favor, lost time to be made good.

Persephone in the West by Debora Greger

[violettesiren]

To the canyon that came so close to touching me, I was nothing. What good was a truck gearing down to go up to the snow?

Still, the walls of rock held themselves at arm’s length to make room. A narrow hall. That wallpaper, lichens splattered on basalt . . .

a bedroom carved out around me. Snow, where had you gone, taking the road with you? Where was the door?

The creek had something to say on this, but not to me. To the rocks the meltwater tumbled, to the willows that reddened

at each wet word, the radio crackled and spat. And still Willie Nelson sang in a whiny fuzz.

The pines strained under the weight of all the dumb sad songs made one. Love gone to seed, love buried under snow— where was a snowbird to feed? A flock of juncos flung itself like a lost scarf over the last weeds. Mist coming down the mountain

to meet someone halfway— I took off a glove. I lay down and played angel. The snow held on, a body of water that wouldn’t melt.   Snow, let go. It’s late. You are corn mush. You are cold. Let me cover you with this white sheet. No one will know.

To The Snow by Debora Greger

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

The Right Whale in Iowa

--Debora Greger

The shag rug of a Great Plains buffalo,      a flightless bird gone to stone: over its fellow keepsakes,      into the archives of air, the whale hauled a harvest of dust.      In the ripples of glass sealed over songbird skins, I wavered.      What could be said for love? From the Full-Serv to the Self-Serv Island      at the Gulf station next door, landlocked waves shivered in a row of corn.      The great flukes lifted. A Milky Way scarred the underside more vast      than the Midwestern night. Dark cargoes would give themselves up      to these shallows that waited to take home the sailor,      home to the sea of fossilized coral upon whose shoals      just down the road the motels of Coralville lay sprawled.      Here would lie a ring scratched by a scrivener with florid hand,      In thy breast my heart does rest flung back to shore, here rest two coins      face to face, joined by the salt that turned them faceless      as they turned to each other.

[violettesiren]

In the subtropics it must be spring; a flock of cedar waxwings, whispering, has tethered the unswayed cabbage palm to the last day's heat.

They devour the fruit no local bird wants. Unswerving, they swerve through clotheslines. Let their whispery cries be mine. Their whisper of wings is yours.

But what good is sight? In the dark, I thought, lay the struggle of mind over body that kept Aquinas awake. Whoever you were, you slept on.

By candlelight nothing is not beautiful. The relief of your finely sculpted head; The drop of wax that fell on your bare shoulder. Why didn't you want me to see you?

The drop of red on each wing almost glows this hour neither dark nor light. Waxwings, forgive me. Fly away north. What was the dark like?

I remember the mind fogged with something not dream. And afterwards what of the traitorous, languorous body? It lies down. It begs.

Psyche and Eros in Florida By Debora Greger