Poetry Sunday: Looking For Each of Us by Linda Gregg

Linda Gregg was an award-winning American poet. She died last week at age 76, and since I didn't know her work, I thought I should get acquainted and introduce her to you. Here is one of her poems.

Looking For Each of Us

by Linda Gregg

I open the box of my favorite postcards   

and turn them over looking for de Chirico   

because I remember seeing you standing   

facing a wall no wider than a column where   

to your left was a hall going straight back

into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down   

to where you stood alone and where the room   

opened out on your right to an auditorium   

full of people who had just heard you read   

and were now listening to the other poet.   

I was looking for the de Chirico because of   

the places, the empty places. The word   

“boulevard” came to mind. Standing on the side   

of the fountains in Paris where the water   

blew onto me when I was fifteen. It was night.   

It was dark then too and I was alone.   

Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t   

somebody find me all those years? The form   

of love was purity. An art. An architecture.   

Maybe a train. Maybe the shadow of a statue   

and the statue with its front turned away   

from me. Maybe one young girl playing alone,   

hearing even small sounds ring off cobblestones   

and the stone walls. I turn the cards looking   

for the one and come to Giacometti’s eyes   

full of caring and something remote.

His eyes are loving and empty, but not with   

nothingness, not for the usual reasons, but because   

he is working. The Rothko Chapel empty. A cheap   

statue of Sappho in the modern city of Mytilene   

and ancient sunlight. David Park’s four men   

with smudges for mouths, backed by water,   

each held still by the impossibility of what   

art can accomplish. A broken river god,

only the body. A girl playing with her rabbit in bed.   

The postcard of a summer lightning storm over Iowa.