'The Last Patch of Irretrievable Light'

I sensed in Jane Greer, even through the unreliable conduit of the internet, an ebullient spirit utterly unlike myself, which is why I felt an immediate attraction to her and her excellent poetry. On New Year’s Eve 2024, Jane wrote to me: “Do come to North Dakota! It’s beautiful—7 months out of the year.” She enjoyed laughing. She must have been a fine hostess. She saw the good in people that I sometimes miss and had a gift for inspiring friendship. When she encouraged you, you knew she meant it. She was no softie. She had a tart sense of humor and had a lot of fun mocking contemporary poetry. In the November 1985 issue of Chronicles, Jane wrote in a review of a selection of Stevie Smith’s poems:

“Now, it’s true that every second slim little poetry volume on the ‘market’ today carries, zipped up snug in its jacket, a blurb by some other famous or infamous poet who claims that this new poet possesses a ‘tremendous sense of voice.’ In this usage, voice means . . . well, I'm not sure. I would challenge all such jacket-quoted literati to identify other, unsigned poems by their proteges from a pile of similar—and equally insignificant—others. It should be worth a hefty grant if they can do it.”

Wednesday was the first anniversary of Jane’s death at age seventy-two. The truest way to honor a dead writer is to read her work and keep it alive. Jane sent me signed copies of her most recent books, both published by Lambing Press: Love Like a Conflagration (2020) and The World as We Know It is Falling Away (2022). Here is the final poem in the latter collection, “Gravel”:

 

“My prayers drop to the ground like so much gravel,

salting the path on which it seems I travel.

Who made the path before me? Others praying.

Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh I hear them saying.”

 

The Hebrew word means “holy,” as in Isaiah 6:3: “And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” In her earlier volume, Jane included “Heartwounding Woods,” set in October, the true Poetry Month:

 

“Do you recall the late-afternoon light

oblique in October woods, the slanting gold

carelessly cast, mottling the secret ground?

The smoke of dreams surrendered or attained

hung in the air, and loss and discontent

grew in the still-green dappled undergrowth.

Do you remember, deep in the pungent leaves

as you sat in stippled shade with half-closed eyes

and there moved across your face and toward the night

the last patch of irretrievable light?”