The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Eclipse

Everyone is flocking toward the dark arc of totality,
motels in Austin, Little Rock, Erie filling 

with those who have come to bathe 
in midday midnight, feel the hushed and humbling awe 

of a wheeling cosmos anointing this prosaic Monday 
with black orb and flaming crown.

Miles from totality, I watch as the light dims 
like a slow fade toward dreaming, 

cameras obscurae of woven branches casting 
thousands of wind-shivered moons on the pavement 

before the trees are merely trees again, 
streets sky-deep in April’s flood of sun.

I admit, I thought I'd feel more. Drunk on longing, 
I let my heart make myth of the firmament, 

wanting to believe in anything that could dispel 
this earthly sorrow, but fate doesn't turn with the stars. 

Isn’t that the brilliance of nature? It needs no reason.
Indifferent to our pleading, it makes beauty just the same.

Along the block, people retreat into houses, 
classrooms and offices, stubbing out last cigarettes, 

cardboard glasses dangling from fists, 
the parched clouds of last autumn's hydrangea 

rattling through the streets like the tumbleweeds 
of suburbia as a pair of robins scrap on the lawn, 

unmoved by the spectacle, orange breasts 
bobbing like shadowed suns.

Zoe Boyer was raised in Evanston, Illinois on the shore of Lake Michigan, and completed her MA in creative writing among the ponderosa pines in Prescott, Arizona. Her work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Poetry South, Kelp Journal, Plainsongs, RockPaperPoem, About Place, West Trade Review, Little Patuxent Review, The Penn Review, and Pleiades, and has been nominated for Best of the Net.

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