Alma to Her Sister by Linda Gregg

Alma to Her Sister
Linda Gregg

alone no loneliness in the dream in the quiet
in the sunrise in the sunset Louise.
in the dream no loneliness in the dream
in the sunrise in the sunset just the two of us

alone no loneliness done. in the dream
in the quiet of the day done in the sunrise
Louise. in the dream in the dream
in the sunrise in the sunset.

alone no loneliness done. no loneliness
in the dream in the quiet
in the sunrise in the sunset. Louise
in the dream. in the sunrise in the sunset.

SELECTED BY CARL PHILLIPS

I loved Gregg’s poem long before I understood how it could be a poem at all. I’d never encountered a poem entirely stripped of active verbs, stripped of all capitalization except for a single repeated name, and stripped of all punctuation except for the period – nothing like a comma or dash or whatever might separate clauses so that we can distinguish them: is it (in line 1) that there’s no loneliness in being alone, or is that only the case in the dream, and is the dream the same as the quiet which seems to occur both in the sunrise and in the sunset, both of which are a way of speaking about Louise, or is Louise being addressed, as the title implies without proving?

For me, part of the point here is that maybe there’s not a need to make distinctions all the time – removing the punctuation allows images to blur in and out of multiple meanings, without privileging any meaning in particular. This poem also seems to be considering enough-ness. The fragments don’t move anywhere (no verbs), they simply get repeated, as if to exist were enough.

Meanwhile, patterns keep occurring, but unpredictably, but when read aloud there’s a definite music – as if that’s all music was, patterning, and all poetry was just patterned language, which I believe it is. The poem feels like a chant, or a conjuring, or an insistence, an urgency, but with a calmness that maybe has to do with the verblessness, which can make a poem seem static or, in this case, seem to float as a gesture might, briefly in the air, before vanishing, even as Louise does, by the end, in the dream, or in the sunrise, or in the sunrise inside the sunset. Must it matter?

ABOUT CARL PHILLIPS

Carl Phillips is the author, most recently, of Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War (2022), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.