The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

October

I move always between two fires,
on a path just wide enough for my feet.

	This path is just wide enough for our feet.
	Downslope, a jack-pine explodes in flames.

I say:  The jack-pine explodes in flames.
I say: No; it is a tattered maple, flame-red in autumn rain.

	The mingled ashes of mother and father in autumn rain
	strewn in a meadow: Below their children the fog drifts.

From the meadow where below the fog drifts
the spires of our hometown look like paint-daubs.

	The church spires, white and grey, look like paint-daubs.
	Why do orphans mingle the ashes of the lost?

Ashes blown in orphan eyes, mingled ashes of the lost:
I am moving between two fires.

When poets get old

they change	       	I think

	tear off the seven veils

	or nine or nine thousand

	shred chiffon     shed spangles

speak plainer and clearer

to be understood, to be known

	unless 	                       	it seems
	
	they are divinely mad

	or damnably mad

	in which case(s)

			   not so much

Everything moves

but the tree trunk. Frantic branches 
bob like skirts.  How will I abide,
and What is being asked of me.

A word, anxious, with the sounds ang 
and shush:  As the child ran about the house 
and yard, searching for the father--

When he turned his face away 
into branches bobbing on the edge of the forest
he took something and left only anxious

attachment. Though it is in the nature 
of fathers, faces, that they turn away, sooner
or later, I fail to learn this since 

the light shined on me seemed
it would burn forever.  Still, 
I am trying to become something,

shush, something other than a daughter.

Decorative Panel by Someone Named Harpignies

1870, Paris: It’s the Pavillon 
de Flore, a large, grand house 
of cream stucco, bulking up
over a high garden wall. Mango-
colored awnings, one torn 
and flapping, arrest our attention, 
as do the dark snaking trunks 
of wet plane trees, striating 
the foreground like tilted iron bars.  

In the room behind one upper
window sits a friend seated
at a table where, with tiny scissors,
she snips words from a magazine. 
She is composing a threat, 
an accusation, a severing, 
that I cannot as yet imagine.
Below, I thread a path through the trees 
with my fox-dog, who adds a splash 
of ginger-fire fur to the sodden 
brown leaves and we agree that,
although the day is wet and people
and dogs vexatious—such strange 
impulses stir in all animal 
hearts—we are glad to be out.  

We head home, across the park
and over the river, to the small 
apartement and its gas ring, to make
tea.  Tomorrow the accusation, 
the threat, will arrive and land 
on the table in the vestibule 
where the mail collects. We will 
pick up the letter to take on our
accustomed walk, and then our steps 
will slow.  (The dog will bark,
and tug, at a sparrow’s flickered 
flight, as we read: or else.) 
Ever more slowly, we will pass
along the garden wall, averting 
our eyes from those inexplicable
mango-colored awnings.

April Bernard’s The World Behind the World, her sixth book of poems, was published in 2023 by W.W. Norton; previous collections are Brawl & Jag, Romanticism, Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her novel Miss Fuller was short-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award; she has also published short fiction in Little Star, Electric Literature, and The Southampton Review, and is a contributor of reviews and essays to The New York Review of Books and Book Post, among other journals. She teaches at Skidmore College and is currently at work on a volume of new and selected poems.

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