Arielle Greenberg

Chamberglass

They tell you, We can't tell you
what your child will be ever like
and they are telling you the truth.
No one, not you, even knows
if there will be such a child.
It's like an opera in which, slowly,
every person born in the red square
on the bingo card of your birth
is drifting away to death-land,
discarding their white silk scarves and fancy dress
to jumble into a heartland of flat, poor sleeping.
You lie awake in the summer night and think about the truth
as you know it, the truth they tell you,
how its sound rises with the heat that keeps you waking.

Some have learned to gamble
and you do not love them anymore,
except a little. They were always good at games.
Some are drinking and lying
about it. They cover each number. You have wishes
that are otherwise, an aside
you sing to the audience buried like good friends
in your chamberglass pit,
the body as empty as after the orchestra
has removed its black clothes.

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Arielle Greenberg's first book, Given, was published by Verse Press in 2002; these poems are from two new manuscripts. With Rachel Zucker, she is editing an anthology of American women's poetry that is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. She is a professor in the poetry program at Columbia College in Chicago. contents | next