LINDA GREGERSON




FOR THE TAKING

TARGET



SAFE

The tendons sewn together and the small bones
healed, that your hand
might close on a pencil again

or hold a cup. The delicate muscles made
whole again,
to lift your eyelid and govern your smile,

and the nerves new-laid in their tracks.
The broken
point of the kitchen knife -- and here

let the surgeon be gentle -- removed and the skull
knit closed
and the blood lifted out of the carpet and washed

from the stairs. And the nineteen-year-old burglar returned
to the cradle or
his mother's arms -- he must have been harmless

once, even he, who is not sorry, had
nothing
to lose, and will never be harmless again.

Emma is learning to wield her own spoon --
silver for abundance,
though it seldom finds her mouth as yet.

She hates to be fed, would rather starve,
but loves
to steer the precarious course herself.

Silver for pride, then, or luck of the sort
some children
are born with, omitting

the manifold slippage
that separates
privilege and weal. Luck in this popular figure

is three parts silver anyway,
that the child
not succumb to crack in the schoolyard,

rats in the hall, the clever fence with a
shopping list,
bad plumbing, bad food, and hatred-on-a-staircase

with a knife in hand and dim designs
on jewelry
or a VCR. The spoon was superfluity --

the best part of your paycheck for a child
you haven't lived
to see. Friend, her cheek is fresh as hope

of paradise. And every passing minute in the hours
of light
and the hours of darkness, in the fever

of pneumonia or the ignorant sweet wash
of health,
the miraculous breath

moves into her lungs, and stitch
by mortal
stitch, moves out.

. . . When the paramedics came at last, my friend
apologized:
she must have hit her head, she thought,

she'd just take a minute to mop up the mess
by the phone.
Her broken hands, for which
the flaw in memory had provided no such
alibi,
her broken hands had kept him two or

three times from her face.
And later
when the anesthesiologist had

launched her on his good green gas
and launched her,
as they do sometimes, a shade too fast,

she slipped the bonds of recall altogether.
Safe
as houses. You know what a house is for the likes

of us: down payment on the nursing home,
our four-square
pledge to be debtors of conscience, if debtors

in conscience may not look too closely
where credit's
refused. Our piece of the here for here-

after, which shows us diminished regard
and just
such a face as fear has made:

one night a woman came home to her house
and locked its useless
locks, and buttoned her nightdress and read

for a while, and slept till she was wakened

-Linda Gregerson



FOR THE TAKING

And always, the damp blonde curls
on her temples
and bountifully down to her shoulder blades,

the rich loose curls all summer mixed with sand
and sweat,
and the rare, voluptuous double

curve of her nether lip -- most children lose
that ripeness before
they can talk -- and the solemn forehead,

which betokens thought and, alas
for her, o-
bedience, and the pure, unmuddied line

of the jaw, and the peeling brown shoulders --
she was always
a child of the sun . . . This

was his sweet piece of luck, his
find,
his renewable turn-on,

and my brown-and-golden sister at eight-
and-a-half
took to hating her body and cried

in her bath, and this was years,
my bad uncle did it
for years, in the back of the car,

in the basement where he kept his guns,
and we
who could have saved her, who knew

what it was in the best of times
to cross
the bridge of shame, from the body un-

encumbered to the body on the
block,
we would be somewhere mowing the lawn

or basting the spareribs right
outside, and -- how
many times have you heard this? -- we

were deaf and blind
and have
ever since required of her that she

take care of us, and she has,
and here's
the worst, she does it for love.

-Linda Gregerson



TARGET

1.

What is, says the chorus, this human
desire --
do you know the part I'm

talking about? What is this
human
desire for children? Medea

has just left the stage
(ab-scaena,
said my friend, ob-

scene) to brood on her terrible work.
His ety-
mology is false, I've looked it up,

but my friend wasn't thinking
of children
in any case. What

says the mother, for all
her books,
who bathes the newborn child

in the sink, is sick
with fear
for the pulse in the scalp, the foot

still flexed as it was in the womb
and peeling
from the amnion. They have no death

in them yet, you see, their very excrement
is sweet,
they have no death but what's implied

in the porcelain rim, the drain
with its food scraps,
the outlet, the sponge, the thousand

mortal dangers in the kitchen drawer.
I'd sometimes feel,
with the child in my arms,

as I've felt looking down on the live
third rail.
What is this human desire

for children? They just make a bigger
target
for the anger of the gods.

2.

The thing she can't be rid of is that
no one
would believe her. Not the uniformed

policeman at the edge of town (and surely
he knew her?
the wildest boast of the census

could scarcely have amounted to
a decent
row of pews on Christmas Eve),

nor her own forbidding father nor
good Emma
at the kitchen sink. Months later

at the jury trial,
the word
of a nine-year-old girl would suddenly

count. Late morning
on the third
of May in 1929

(the other crash was yet to come),
no seam
of comprehension in the ordered world,

no help from the mild
spring sky,
my nine-year-old mother ran at last

to the dead girl's house and de-
livered
her burden of blight directly. Arrow

unwilling, whoever took pity
on you?
The rest replays in borrowed

light: the courtroom in Chicago with its
unswept floors,
two girls with their handsful

of violets. And one moving one way while the car
bore down
and one, my mother, the other.

3.

For those who think, as he did once,
that in-
advertent suffering is the worst of it here,

in the range between hating thy neighbor
and destruction
on a global scale, the middle range,

where people live, the range
from the hills,
the journalist describes his con-

versation with a captured Serb.
The boy --
the man? -- was twenty-two.

I am happy, he said. He must
have been asked
what he hoped for or thought

while he lay in the high half-light with his
gun,
a sniper in the frozen hills whose

angle on the heart and hearth's acute.
I am happy,
he said, to kill a child crossing

the street with his mother.
Now something
has been altered in the transit

from language to language; this isn't
exactly
the way we speak. Offstage,

obscene, the god-from-a-machine
at work.
And circuitry whose other name

is "happy": coincident
access
of never-on-this-good-green-earth

and ground-from-which-we-start.
I am happy
to kill a child crossing the street with his mother.

There is something so fantastic on the mother's face.

-Linda Gregerson