The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

What We Knew of the Dark

I learned to love the glorious dark in the dark.
So sayeth the night in the sixty-three day gestation of a beagle-hound.

I loved the dark and learned the dark in layers of midnight swamps.
This, the bluetick and redbone hounds howled inside a cloud-obscured moon.

The darkness learned not to lean on light for the light within itself.
Something like this was overheard while bending my body through the dark rings of a
sycamore.

Tell the dark to stay deeply dark.
This I heard, as if the bloodroot moon had lost the thin skin of its veil.

The glorious dark darkens down the dark.
The Treeing Walker hounds bayed up at two possums in the shagbark hickory and oak.

So sayeth the hounds, the trees, the swamp-stuck moon, the murmuring leaves.
And so it is written that the moon was torn from the silk throat of the hounds and placed
in the shivering mouth of an owl.

Sounding Very Much Like a Mouth

At that time, I had been busy writing an autobiography of my years as a fire ant in
Namibia.
I had to get it right, as the book was only one six-word sentence long.

There are narratives that follow us into the grocer’s. The dentist’s office. The dirt.
I wish I could write about myself the way I see myself, not how others experience me.

Plato once said that Aristophanes had been a musician. That it was the music of the
spheres that wrote his plays, not the playwright himself.
And Tolstoy was still grumbling from town to town, walking stick in hand, his torn
sackcloth slung over his left shoulder.

I wish I could write each village whole. To make the hunger go away. To salve the slain,
resuscitate the dead.
I wish I no longer had things for which to wish—hoping, as I do, for the best.

Last night, I heard a bird lift from inside me, stirring the dirt.
I recognized the words but also knew it was the Word itself that kept drawing me back
into a body. Over and again.

I have lived so many lives that I am tired of the old alphabets. Even the Sumerian
cuneiform tablets I lay beneath for shade.
Here, breathe unto me. Help me sleep while I wake. Help me write the undiscovered
vowels of a new, loving world order.

A Spectacular Grievance of Inverted Rain

In any instant, it could be a bluegill or a green sunfish of the southern swamp country.
Even my friends told me I needed to get out more, to forget the dip of its swim, the grip
of nighthawks in my chest.

But there was a spectacular grievance of inverted rain.
There were bog conditions inside me, sphagnum in my throat.

And so, since the season was very much a stretch of late August, we knew we were
locked in the summer of a small lake.
And when the little sedges revealed crocodile tail inscriptions of our nightly dreams we’d
told to no one, we were certain the gnawing of a porcupine in an aspen was just a
cautionary music.

It must have been my three-day beard that startled me.
I was suddenly gray, top to bottom, yet whenever I stumbled upon a mirror I felt I was
getting further from the truth.

Born in winter, as a child of the cold, I woke each morning longing to see the snowshoe
hare.
I vowed to clear the snow on my back steps then walk up and down them continuously
for an hour, seeing if I could catch the falling flakes on my tongue before they melted,
hoping the way they dissolved inside me might teach me to love seeing myself
walking away from what others were constantly fleeing toward.

George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014–2016), is the author of twenty-seven books of poetry (eighteen full-length books and nine chapbooks). One of his recent books, To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me (Dos Madres Press, 2023), recently received the 2024 Indiana Book Award for Poetry. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years. He now lives in Livermore, Colorado.

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