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Editor’s Note: The arts are a significant thread in the fabric of Rockland County. They inspire, enrich, and chronicle our lives. They also play a role in our economic well-being; theater, writing, dance, crafts draw us to spaces. They invite strangers to share in our bounty. They are an indelible contribution. Welcome again, Christine Potter, a poet, to RCBJ.
Lily Greenberg: God, Sisterhood and In The Beginning
By Christine Potter
Poet Lily Greenberg came to Rockland County after quite a few stops along the way: born in Tennessee, she lived in New England and France for a while, and ended up here when her husband came to Pearl River to run a family business. She’s now happily at home in Nyack, which I believe could be the location of the Great Force that pulled so many poets here. Everyone I’ve interviewed for this column who wasn’t born in Rockland County has a different getting-here story, but I’m beginning to think there’s a big old silver and red poet-attracting horseshoe magnet buried in the woods up by The Hook. (Its power is subtle but irresistible.)
Or maybe it’s just that once we unpack and hang our pictures on the walls, poets tend to seek out community. Lily Greenberg did just that, creating The All Ways Writing Collective with Nyack’s McCullers House—and setting up writing circles and readings with them, Big Red Books, Friends of River Hook, and Marydell. Greenberg was also involved (with poet H.E. Fisher) in getting Rockland County a poet laureate again. Juan Pablo Mobili is going into his second year on the job now, and what a gift his talent and energy has been!
Like many poets, Greenberg was nominated for a Pushcart prize for one of her poems. Like very, very few of us, she has actually won one. Here it is:
The Beginning According to The Wild
was a mess
of drool and semen and teeth.
Leaves everywhere. Ginkgoes reeking
that rancid butter stink. And toad spawn
planted in the pores of mother’s back.
And blackhead birth. And hagfish slime.
You who want the beginning to be clean as a word—
but this was before words.
In the beginning I was an eye
crusted over—each time I blinked
the day and night drew closer together as if
huddling around a fire.
There was no light then
only green water, glittering
clouds, that sleepy feeling of eyes
closed on a rock.
No darkness but redwood
shade, caves of breath, no moon night.
No seasons—just death
of organs to dirt to sprouts.
In the beginning I was one
boar carcass and vultures and
thousands of boars running.
In the beginning I was a finch
tossing finches out of the nest.
Some became sky. Some turned to stone.
I know you want to fall
from a first world of undivided light.
I know you want to get back
but I’m telling you—
in the beginning we lost
everything many times over,
we died and died. Trust me—
there’s nothing to get back to.
(First published in New England Review; Republished in Pushcart Prize LXIX)
Usually at this point in this column, I pick out a few choice phrases from the poem I’ve just shared and explain what I like about them. Or comment about voice and authenticity. This time, I just want to say holy cow! The whole thing’s brilliant.
The “in the beginning” lines refer both to the opening of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word”) and Genesis (“In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth). Greenberg describes the primordial ooze as stinky, random, oddly beautiful (the redwood light) and sometimes brutal. Vultures. Boar carcasses. A “finch/tossing finches out of the nest.”
And then there’s that powerful turn: “I know you want to fall/from a first world of undivided light…” How did she know? That’s exactly what I do want! But then comes the conclusion, “in the beginning we lost/everything many times over/we died and died…”
I’m writing this column on a day of tragic news in our country, and those lines resonate deeply. And the poem’s last line is a total mic drop.
Does it come as a surprise that Greenberg is studying to become an Episcopal priest? She told me she’s “obsessed with writing about God.” She’s absolutely doing that in “The Beginning According to The Wild.” Her newest work continues that quest for the sacred.
“My current manuscript contemplates God through a queer, feminine lens,” she says, “imagining Spirit as an instigator of change. I refer to God throughout the collection as ‘The Wild’ which I see as an imminent life force that is constantly revealed and hidden—in much the same way that an encounter with a wild animal is seen in a glimpse and pregnant with mystery.”
Lily Greenberg is a huge believer in the power of revision. I have never heard of anyone else using her technique for doing it, a meditative process I want to try it out myself: “When I make a poem, I memorize it, and when I’m out walking or driving or doing something where my mind wanders, I dwell in the poem. I think of it kind of like arranging furniture in a room…”
Yes, it would be! I love the idea of poems as rooms you can enter—and mental revision of a memorized working draft certainly beats listening to podcasts. Lily says she revises the most when she is putting a collection of poems together, and that’s really interesting, too. I tend to call things done once they’ve been published in a magazine, although I did fiddle with some of the poems that had been published before as I put together my new book, Why I Don’t Take Xanax. That felt like cheating at the time—but now I know it wasn’t.
One of the things that attracted me to Lily Greenberg’s poems was the fact that she writes about her sister. I’m a sister, too, and I know how much writing about family is a balancing act between honesty and love. Anne Lamott famously said “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” It’s a funny line but it never made it easier for me, honestly. Greenberg’s poem “Sister God” is a good example of how to walk that tightrope.
Sister God
My first god was my sister. I didn’t know where she was.
She would vanish and reappear, my holy spirit.
Her absence, a creek of small prayers
I trickled to her: Don’t leave me alone.
I lived in the Jerusalem of her bedroom
beneath the portrait of a sundressed girl.
Was it her? I wouldn’t know.
When I wore her Juicy sweatsuit, I looked
nothing like her. I waited for a voice
to say, Sleep in my room, rest in my bed.
I waited to run into her on a Tuesday street—
sister girl, sister hands, sister head heavy in my arms.
And the streets stayed full of her.
And I believed she was my sin.
And people with her name flooded my days
so that when she came home, nobody saw a miracle:
a woman at the edge of a bed,
her voice: Get out of my room.
(First published in Sun Dog Lit, 2024)
Another wow. I love the portrait, and the Juicy sweatsuit. And I love the whole idea of a troubled sister that comes and goes like God, or faith in God. And again, such a wonderful close: after all that longing and devotion, “Get out of my room.” It’s pitch-perfect, and it’s heartbreaking. There’s a lot of easier spiritual and religious poetry that focuses on praise and on God saying yes. The absent sister God, the feeling that God has not welcomed the person seeking Her…there’s honesty there, an unforced conclusion. I like it.
Another poem that dances on the tightrope of family (and God!) is Greenberg’s “Between a Woman on the Ground and a Man in the Clouds:”
Between a Woman on the Ground and a Man in the Clouds
Spent another summer at the pool
where boys beat each other with noodles and girls
hang on the lap ropes. There I go again—
boys and girls. Someone small marches
an ice cream sandwich across the grass and a mother goes,
What’ll it be today, he or they?
Who would I be if no one told me who I was?
Probably still parting dead bees with breaststroke
while men in the shallow end
use big words like phenomena and country.
In this country, a woman taught me to swim
by tossing my baby body in the water.
Her name was Ms. Carolyn. She was Australian
and believed not wanting to die was how to grow.
Each day she preached shark attacks and wave swells
to the landlocked children of Tennessee.
My graduation involved treading water fully clothed
and thus proving No, Mom, I will not be
a child dead in the water. That was my sister. My mother
looked up from her crossword and clapped.
Walking out I pointed to a large woman and said
Somebody’s pregnant! and got pulled
into the car as if out of the water. Listen to me,
my mother said. You don’t know anything
about being a woman. Her body is between her
and God, so mind your own.
All the way home I pictured her body
lifted between a woman on the ground
and a man in the clouds. Between her and God,
a body exalted. Between her and God,
a body afloat. Back home I climbed in the tub
with Barbie, lifting her above me
to somewhere just out of reach,
where my sister lives. Heaven is
a blue-eyed blonde with long legs.
I was a frog in the wrong pond.
No, this is my water:
a perfect woman I was given to give
back to God. She goes. I stay.
There is much in here about family, but also about women and their bodies and the skills one needs to survive. I had a tough-as-nails swimming teacher, too; I love the detail about the Australian woman drilling little girls from no-coastline Tennessee about dangerous waves in the ocean. There is the shadow of the troubled sister here, too—“dead in the water”—and the mother involved in her crossword puzzle. And then the mother’s attention finally gotten when the narrator makes an unintentionally rude comment to a woman with a large body. Greenberg manages to make really cool imaginative leaps with the kind of literal take young kids have on the world and what is beyond it: the sister-God, the Barbie that must be given back to God.
Lily Greenberg grew up in a house with musician parents and two different religions: her dad was Jewish and her mom Christian. She says both think about faith in “an outside the box kind of way in their art.” Her mom won three Grammys for Christian Gospel music. Greenberg’s current manuscript is named The Wild You Called and I hope it comes out soon! Her first book, In The Shape of a Woman, is available through Broadstone Books.
Here’s a poem from my new full-length collection, Why I Don’t Take Xanax. It’ll be at Nyack’s Big Red Books by the time you read this, and I’m hosting an open mic there on Wednesday, February 18th at 6:30pm. Come say hi!
Forsythia, 1973
I didn’t want to leave my dorm room,
and knew I’d have to. It was late April.
In water glasses from the dining hall,
I was forcing forsythia, breathing in its
yellow, grassy no-scent, looking up from
Dubliners at blossoms rioting despite
Upstate’s still-winter greys and browns,
where it could snow in May and I could
pretend I didn’t have to go home to see
endless reruns of my parents’ thousand
disappointments: the fury of my mother’s
heartbroken jokes, my father’s heavy step
past her, the screen door’s metallic
slap as he carried his pitcher of martinis
outside. Slushy rain ticked my windows.
Down home, eye-stinging green pollen
already dusted the patio. On the wobbly
oak table I’d just bought at auction, a few
tiny blooms had dropped overnight. Tinier
leaves were already growing in. Soon,
I’d pull all my posters down, jam the table
into the back seat of my mother’s Dodge.
Mom would be chipper; she loved taking
the five-hour drive up and back—away
from my father. Dreading the finals I knew
I’d do fine on, I wanted only the click of ice
needling glass on an endless, shadowless
afternoon. I didn’t even want to turn the page.
(Originally in Halfway Down The Stairs)
See you here in the RCBJ in March—and maybe we will even have forsythia by then!
