As Being Is Eternal
She is sitting alone in the bright room.
There are two other rooms, one dark
and closed, the other with a single light.
Outside there is a cold November.
She is remembering the statues
she saw in Greece on the mountain,
in empty rooms where light was added
to light, surrounded by silence.
They seemed ready to be seen.
The way one hears a door quietly
close and footsteps coming closer.
Present and past like that. The way
art is exact. Like the woman
in her lighted room.
She could rise and walk
into one of the empty rooms
that she is not in. Could see
a vase of red roses on the table
where white roses were last week.
Time has finished its journey,
has come its long half way.
The air is heavy as water as she
bends her head over the page.
Notes
There is something unsettling about how much of a life remains hidden, even from those closest to us. In Linda Gregg’s *As Being Is Eternal*, the ordinary world carries a sense of something larger and more enduring, as though our brief encounters with people and places belong to a continuity we can never fully understand. The self is always changing, shaped by memory, desire, and the passing of time. Yet we long for something within us to remain recognizable, something that survives the many versions of ourselves we leave behind. For November’s theme, The Mask, Gregg’s poem invites us to consider what persists beneath the identities we inhabit. Perhaps what endures is less a fixed face than the experience of being alive, moving through forms we can never entirely hold. #LindaGregg #AmericanPoetry #ContemporaryPoetry #Existentialism #Identity