Poetry

The man used to walk four miles a day, 
two hours at first, less as he got stronger 
and thinner, to defy the sense of rules that dictates 
higher challenges as the ability climbs. Rebel 
mind in a rebel body. Not even Plato’s 

The squirrels deny themselves from front and back 
and only word into view from the sides when 
their outline rejects the coup of geometry. 
From the south we delight in the polar symmetry 
of their foggy tails cupped by rounded hinds. 

the world is made perfect why not rebuild here lies the water made of motion same day different peace is a matter of time

Odious Chloe wrote this
  on her seven husbands’ graves:

Away from the cruel magnification
            of a shaving mirror, I clean up well.
I am content with orange teeth and salty
            skin, with having borrowed my beauty 

            from the ocean. See my kelpy eyes, the pearl
on my...

What realms of gold did they travel,
these old field glasses? Her last pair,
focused beyond the tame sea-stacks 
of glass and bottle, they’d have caught––
from her Boston Harbor condo–– 
birds in maneuvers, breaches of whales.

You bought yourself a low-cost house
  for only forty thou’.
Then lost it in a city fire;
  they burn so often now.

It’s normal to do it alone, the feint-and-jab
           of forgetting. I believe in only what I can recite 

from memory, like the ninety-nine names
           for thirst: soft-hell, root-torn-from-soil, rain-

i.m. Greg Greger (1923–2015)

I. West of Chekhov

A month since Father died. Back in our old house, 
sisters, where were we? Desert of childhood, 
      great preserver, 

for you we opened another closet.
Father the farm boy––what didn’t he...

Africanus has a million bucks, 
and still he wants and wants and wants.