Looking For Each of Us

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.