The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Observing the Solar Eclipse of April 8, 2024, in Secaucus, New Jersey

                    after James Wright

As the moon slid into its forecasted place
hundreds of thousands of miles away,
I watched a ladybug haul its spotted compact
across the community pool’s stones,
felt my telomeres shortening.
                                                        Pinhole leaves
cast fingernail clippings of grayish light
until the lessening sun resembled a banana.
 
Everything was crescent and eldritch—
in the best sense, with the New Jersey sky
eerily clear and squirrels parkouring
in the weak branches.
                                         I, too, was between
conclusions, en route to another college town
just half-heartedly, like a miscast penny.

Precipitation

The restaurant’s sous chef, who
attended Le Cordon Bleu
for two semesters, chops kale 

and squash as her boss
does the numbers (rent, expenses)
at a slab of butcher’s block.

Dairymen bottle their feelings
logging into the government breadline;
programmers code their usurpers.

Maybe tomorrow’s yolk breaks
in a foundry of clouds.
That sky, a cottony process

now interpreted by supercomputers,
ginned itself for millennia
over the heads of the rainmakers.

Negative Dialectics

               ‘Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?’
               ‘A blighted one.’
                                                                          —Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Sitting with quarters
in the new laundromat,
I revisited Adorno
on astrology. It’s fall,
after which the mercies
end. Chips for dinner,
why not; an apple
for dessert, circling out
the bruised fruit
with a knife. Negation
is itself negated, I think
that was his point—
a six-pack of alcohol
without alcohol,
gluten-free oatmeal.
If you remove the bad,
what you’re left with
is worse. I’ll walk
to keep from thinking
some nights. No stars,
of course, though
they are there. Cancer
keeps a pincer lifted
at all times: the empty
firmament loathes
that which it controls.

Thème varié

                    for Ariana

This morning, having slept
on Chloe and Peter’s cat-scratched leather couch
and showered myself warm,
I stuffed a tote with important accessories
and hunched into my mother’s Ford.
 
Breakfasted at the supermarket,
then I left Oreos and a bouquet of crocuses
on a sick professor’s front porch.
 
His wife, the suburban hermit with a bowl cut,
is a collagist noted in Britain (storks
and skeletons and historic landscapes,
invisibly pinned) as well as poet
with ten collections,
tying her husband.
                                    No kids—or, not together.
The air, full of ducks
and the outflow of a fenced-off gas depot,
is, well, tarred and feathered.
 
A northern friend has asked me for two oranges:
one stolen, the other store-bought.

Vague Supplication

                 ESTRAGON: And what did he reply?
                 VLADIMIR: That he’d see.
                 ESTRAGON: That he couldn’t promise anything.
                                                                —Samuel Beckett

After the wealthy developer moved in
a jackhammer became my alarm clock.
That orange tree? It’s a Hitachi digger.
My single window, which looks onto
an AutoZone and a rehab, cracked
last month, the irony being that curtains
of rainwater pour in when it storms,
though I never got around to hanging
anything. Like birds, I wake to light.
Software refers to my “feed” as though
I’m a horse. Pickpocket logic keeps
me poor—like one of Beckett’s tramps,
I go for what is within reach, a carrot
or a shriveled radish, and complain
about nothing. “Why,” asks Estragon,
“will you never let me sleep?” Perhaps,
like Vladimir, the developer is lonesome
for paying company. If I text Lucky,
our Slavic handyman, he just holds me
off another week: surely, the repairs
will be finished next week, without fail.

Erick Verran is the author of Obiter Dicta (Punctum Books, 2021) and a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Georgia Review, Literary Matters, Rain Taxi, the American Poetry Review, the Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Salt Lake City.

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