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Elegance
by Linda Gregg
Elegance - Linda Gregg
I lived for half a year in West Texas and walked on the same road every evening at five and wrote many poems that had to do with that time. Also I didn't speak for four months and just walked in the evening on the desert. This poem actually was written remembering a visit I made to a nearby dead town.
Elegance
All that is uncared for.
Left alone in the stillness
in that pure silence married
to the stillness of nature.
A door off its hinges,
shade and shadows in an empty room.
Leaks for light. Raw where
the tin roof rusted through.
The rustle of weeds in their
different kinds of air in the mornings,
year after year.
A pecan tree, and the house
made out of mud bricks. Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing. If not to the sun,
then to nothing and to no one.
from All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Gray Wolf Press, 2008), copyright © 2008 by Linda Gregg, used by permission of Graywolf Press.