The Glacier
Issue One
Winter 2022
Nightside
“I think romance is actually a problem for intimacy. Because it comes with so
many projections that it’s not very liberating to be the object of those
projections, because it puts you in a place which is not free. In both directions.
Women project onto men . . . and vice versa. I don’t think you’re really seeing
the other person, able to see the person, because you’re much more
fascinated by your own projections. Either way you don’t get seen. And
intimacy is probably about being seen.”
-Jane Campion, Interview, CBC Radio,
"Writers & Company" with Eleanor Wachtel
I wake in the night and pad
downstairs for a pill.
Coming back up
the street
through the front window glistening
under lamp light.
Only a sheen. Magic.
Women are seen as magic
Jane Campion says
in the interview. Men are
“brought to their knees
by the feminine.” But I’m too
awkward. More like
Anne Lamott who talks
about being ghosted
after “three perfect dates.” Who
says she is too “big and
juicy.” Lord, yes.
I said I am a loose cannon.
And he said, ever tactful,
I think you are enthusiastic.
I asked the Tarot directly
about him, because it’s come
to that. I got the Five
of Wands in which everyone’s
trying to knock each
other down with their leaf-sprouting
sticks. Men—but they could
as well be women. I tried
three different source
books to get an interpretation
I liked, but here
is what they all said:
“You got competition,
girl.”
God’s Narrows in Manitoba. Winnipeg,
where he grew up. I don’t even
take Minnesota seriously
because the people wear flip flops
in winter. My whole dream
life occurs under three quilts—
even in summer—
in the tropics.
Ugh. The cold. The nightside.
Northern Ontario, where my
dreamy lover resides.
Sarah, my strength trainer, who has
listened to the blow-by-blow,
the crushers and the crushees,
the ghosting,
the dangerous threats from the one
I had formerly cherished—for the two
years and counting since
my husband left—
he said he didn’t care
how many times I’d
dislocated my hip
he wasn’t going to pay
for Sarah—which I of course
ignored—said, Yeah you got
competition. It’s the woman
the Canadian loved who died.
Though I admire liars in the way
they grab the power
in a given situation and just
commandeer it, I’ve never
developed the skill. So much
to keep track
of. I told him the truth
about what happened in my
marriage. He said,
Are you ready to
start a new life? Has he become
another person? And I said
Yes, fantasizing of course that this
was a direct invitation—visualizing
my former husband standing on my
(formerly, our) deck the week
before, when Eleanor was here and Dan from
New England was visiting.
For the first and only time to date
we’ve shared a “social space.” I observed
the giant gold watch that I was positive
his girlfriend had given him—I’d read
that watches were a love gift—didn’t
Jennifer Aniston give
John Mayer a Rolex—or was it vice
versa? The watch gift means
something along the lines of, “Yours is big.”
Or “Mine is big.” But
basically he looked small to me.
Women are exotic, says Campion.
And men are trying to bash down the
barricades. But can
I do it? Can I sustain it? Even for a minute?
I like the nightside. In which I project
onto my love as if he’s a drive-in
movie screen. He speaks well
(okay, I haven’t heard his voice;
I’m guessing). He writes well.
He speaks French. He loved a woman. He
didn’t just play at it. He has those
smoldering eyes. He’s sick
and lies in bed a lot.
He’s beautiful, like an odalisque.
The Wabash River flows. Sludgy
river where my former husband
puts in his canoe
to paddle with his lover.
I wanted to jump in it
when my husband and I moved here.
My marriage was that good. My “self-esteem.”
I knew someone who did
jump in but was fished
out, he told our AA meeting—but then
later he was picked up
for strangling his girlfriend.
Rivers are like that. The nightside.
My husband—okay, damn it, my ex-husband--
lives in a luxury apartment just across
the Wabash. Train whistle, clacking
on the tracks, two car bridges and
one bricked pedestrian
connecting the eastside
to west mark his days. My girls have been
there. The garish yellow
and red painting
of a foregrounded palazzo outside
of Valetta—all curves—that my uncle
gave us as a wedding gift lives
there. Apparently, a weird glittery shawl
is draped between it and a wall sconce—
a kind of “new life” canopy
over the bed.
My girls will never live
on the nightside again.
Free-wheeling dreams and
magic carpets. Or at least
the younger one won’t. Lucy,
here in dopamine-nation,
consumer-addled U.S., the younger,
labored at holding the
damn marriage together. Now, left
holding blank air.
I’m going to keep with the Manitoba,
the dark apartment
where my love’s eyes
glow like coals
from the OKCupid photograph. His other
photos. But really the one.
I showed my therapist
the picture. I made
a crack about my lack
of purchase/valence on the men
I find myself wanting.
She took one look
and rolled her eyes.
It was like she said
“You’re toast. You’re getting
knocked down by
those wands one way
or the other.”
Muddy, churning river
where he puts in his new
blue canoe to paddle
with his love. We were
given a lot of date instructions
by our marriage counselor. He did
a good job with those I learned
when the bank accidentally posted
his statement with mine. Restaurants,
outings, air bnbs . . .
flowers!
You’re toast. You’re getting
knocked down by those wands
one way or the other.
My cyber man’s OK Cupid
green light is always on.
I’m flying like the Little Lame
Prince at night on a cloud. No, wait,
he sailed around on a magic
cloak. I’m the one who wants,
studying provinces
and maps, trying to discern
Covid border regulations.
My would-be writes to me of propinquity.
How we don’t have it.
Stateside, I dream under
three fluffy quilts, my tropical
paradise. Not a mile away,
the man I lived with for
thirty-four years
lowers his canoe
into the milky water.
DANA ROESER‘s fourth book, All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, won the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press and was published in September 2019. Her previous books won the Juniper Prize and the Samuel French Morse Prize (twice). She was a recipient of the GLCA New Writers Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and several other awards and residencies. Recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Poem-a-Day, North American Review, Pleiades, Guesthouse, Barrow Street, and others. For more information, please see www.danaroeser.com.
Artwork by Austin Veldman.
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