The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Lake According to Stone Swimmer

Pike have brushed against me
	          as I have spent centuries 
watching water shelf against rock. 

My stillness is just a myth,
	          as is the hummingbird’s, 
as is the rattling shush of quaking aspen. 

Just wait for any wind
	          and you’ll finally see 
me; in this caesura is where we meet 

traveling through each other’s dreams,
                though only with the patience 
of a lake will we wake to another’s presence.

Dead Elk Eats a Rhododendron Bloom and Accidentally Has a Psychedelic Experience

He tucks himself into a hillside of blooming rhododendron waiting for the heat to cool, watching hawk shadows careen across the ravine and through his daydreams. After a few hours, he can no longer resist their scarlet brightness and wonders if they taste like Swedish Fish and would stick to his molars so he touches the flowers to his lips and nibbles and chews and swallows and stares for a few minutes. It tastes of salty almonds and diesel chocolate and meadow tea slushies. The wind stops. The light filtering through spruce shutters and camera clicks and he’s a Polaroid picture flicked and snapped until a form slowly shapes the white space of hunger and awe as his face peels like September birch bark and his eyes crackle like hemlock needles touched to flame and the stream below him turns to mad honey that he’s tumbling towards, delving into, letting it take him away. He floats like a stone finally lifted from its resting spot and thinks he’s free, rolling and balancing and riding the wave towards its natural crest, until he realizes that even when you’re dead you’re held by the land that’s always been there, murmuring; so he licks and slurps the sweet river until he’s sweetened and caramelized and he swims on the gratitude of being full once again and gazes back up the hillside to see the daughter they had only known for one year before losing her to the wanderings—her eyes were his, her smell was her mother’s. He tries to ask her where she lived and who she cared for and tell her a joke about elephants to hear her laugh, but all that comes out is a five piece free jazz song careening against boulders into a deep processional cacophony of backwater and bullfrogs and by the time the piano and trumpet and saxophone and drum and bass die the wings he never knew she had, that he never knew were possible, swoop her away. He cries until he remembers her mother who he loved and looked for each fall and he drifts in their shared warmth which, like all passion, pulls him to the surface of the moment as he washes up onto an island of driftwood and thrush song trickles through his jaw and the canopy opens into a cedar lined symphony hall and his lungs are lichen and the clouds breathe in and breathe out with him as he lies there until all the light leaves the trees and he feels the hardness of gravity; now, he looks for them in every flowering bloom knowing they are the firmament he will always exist within.

Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He is the author of two poetry collections — River, Amen (winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry) and Robbing the Pillars — and his writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Hopper Magazine, Water~Stone Review, and North American Review. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize.

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