ISSUE 35
May 2007

Eamon Grennan

 

Eamon Grennan has taught at Vassar College for many years and currently teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of Columbia University. His most recent collections are Still Life with Waterfall (Graywolf, 2002) and The Quick of It (Graywolf, 2005). He is the co-translator, with Rachel Kitzinger, of Oedipus at Colonus (2004), published by Oxford University Press.

Stars Are Better Than War    


is what the chalked scrawl on the footpath says.
But think of the trouble one would cause, falling,
its blind havoc of brightness without warning—
though for days your cats would be scratching
in and out of the house, tail-hairs spiked
for no reason. And why are the birds flying
upside down in ragged formations, or a ragtaggle
raft of geese rambling North in November
against the natural drag of goose-blood? All
the patterns that would shatter if any errant star
pitched us its curve ball breaking into rose
and gas, all that lethal radiance that would
leave us, at best, ash? Every night now
your dream-life is full of exploding cars, train
wrecks, bridges burning, children disappearing—
one ache after another finding its local, homely,
known face, ferreting you out till you lie there
in five o'clock not-light, your eyes trying to read
the future in the leaf pattern on the curtains,
in the ceiling cracks or the whispers and little
metallic moans of the heating system, or in the
steady breath beside you, the precise particular
clench of the hand sliding towards and finding
your hand, and holding, till you slip back into sleep
with its war-dreams, word-glimmers, shooting stars.

 

 

Eamon Grennan: Poetry
Copyright ©2007 The Cortland Review Issue 35The Cortland Review