Summer in a Small Town
When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it’s Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is grey, the air hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.
-by Linda Gregg
Linda Gregg (1942-2019) was born in Suffren, New York, and grew up in Marin County, California. She published numerous poetry collections including The Sacraments of Desire (1992); Chosen by the Lion (1995); Things and Flesh (1999), finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; In the Middle Distance (2006); and All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (2008), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award.
She taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, the University of California-Berkeley, and Princeton University. Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Sara Teasdale Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She lived in New York.