Sara Gilmore, The Green Lives

 

Railroad

I late was called to distant slush
The early angel in me noonless 

A breeding blankets
That will not fail 

To meet you. Lately I own my warning
Overhang and little at wire in the branches 

Drop it over the grid an image
With its own eyes with its own completion. 

In a version of the uncommonly unclear we are
Skimping along morning morning noon night 

Let the refuse lay quiet down instead.
In shutters outside that nothing dislocates or wills, 

On a monitor printing the moon
I look through the window. Outside or inside 

Either petals sticking to the glass or confront extending
Without instruction being swept sweet. 

In noise, we are in common
Contained in hurt’s arms, what do you think like that. 

The image watches and waiting, not looking up
Not looking down, slips, maybe it sees us. 

If crawl inside, if submerge,
If we open our eyes what happens. 

1/19/2021

I hadn’t heard of Sara Gilmore, an American poet and translator who teaches at the University of Iowa and works as a phlebotomist, before seeing a copy of her full-length collection The Green Lives (Portland OR: Fonograf Editions, 2025). Through this debut and expansive collection of poems, I was immediately struck by the remarkable possibility of her lyrics, a propulsive and rhythmic swirl of long lines, long sentences that push and twist. “The ocean is for respect,” begins the short poem “Woman,” “alone it is, a sticker on the water / floor is another code. To wait for nativity, its falter / hurry.” Oh, the rhythms, the rhythms; and the way she twists punctuation and language, allowing sound and meaning to swirl into entirely unexpected spaces. Her punctuation works in delicate ways, offering moments of visual rhythm, syncopation and contradiction. It works precisely because she knows exactly what she’s doing. “So it was,” begins the poem “Man with gun,” “I was / caught in my single permission / catering in all diseases of the mouth / the result of a nostalgia / I built my home / in threatening handsome young men / on the basketball court.”

Each poem is accompanied by a date, and a symbol: ‘hobo signs,’ as she offers, providing an opening note that tells of these symbols, “socially constructed following the Civil War and through the Great Depression, denote the meanings of things, places, roads, and the people that hobos encountered, and served to tell, warn, and recommend them to other migrants. Markings were usually made in chalk or charcoal on fences, buildings, trees, and pavements.” A suggestion that one direction might hold folk friendly enough to offer a meal, or warnings that danger lay ahead. As part of her opening note, “ABOUT THE SIGNS,” she offers, also:

When I thought I was in one place, I was actually in another, again and again; this night the places repeating or beating in their own heart. Sometimes the owner is in—present, inside—even if, of course, “the holding of property is robbery.” Sometimes, she’s alone, telling me, “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to the baby”—and then I’m with her. At times, the owner is out—faraway, outside—leaving the vividness, the itinerant, the visions, their home. Then the baby is my own.

Through the counterpoint of dates and signage, Gilmore offers such curious specificity of placement, even in what appears as a kind of abstract. “If to everything there must be an inside and an outside,” the same note offers, “I’ll make the outside to assimilate states of precarity and abandon, for which no understanding holds.” There is such purpose here, composing a book-length poem, in many ways, around safety, solace; around both being and becoming. Curiously, Gilmour wrote on one of the poems that ended up in this collection for The Paris Review last year, offering this as part of an interview:

“Safe camp” belongs to a cycle of serial poems written around the symbols that itinerant communities have historically used in the U.S. After the Great Depression, as people (many of whom were teenagers) moved across the country looking for work, they would leave scratch marks or markings in chalk outside the places they visited, to tell others what those places were like. For many years I’ve had a copy of Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs and Signets, which includes a catalogue of these visual symbols and verbal descriptions of their meanings: “Owner is in,” “Keep quiet, “Bad dog,” “Safe camp.” There’s something flat and solid about these descriptions that contrasts with the way I write.

“It’s morning when my man leaves: he tells me of a burden line of / temperate climate,” Gilmour writes, as part of the poem “# #,” “first place,      counter-rising I don’t / fill beside it. / A water gauge, a page: still how I happened.” In truth, this very much seems a book of searching, of wandering; of placement, seeking out a home, a safety, or simply a place to lay one’s head.

Look out the window for days after headaches, watching: row for washing, revoke still.
Today I saw you distracted by a noise faltering noise from air conditioners
green blue in slowness and distance. The steps before it too 

up and down        always the first time.