The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

A Few Questions for M.

Will you be in town for the gala? 
Bring a dish to the potluck? A sprig 
of parsley? I love the word sprig, part pig 
and part sprite, part spring and part twig, 
as useless as parsley, as garnish–
part radish, part garish, part garnet and gala. 
Will you coffee? Drink if you drink? 
Sandwich if you sandwich? And let’s 
not get started on drink, kin to brink 
and drip, to blink and bring. My memory 
fails. I cannot, most days, recall the name
Suzanne Vega. That folkish song 
remixed to a dance tune? 
If one can reckon that arms-raised 
sauntering dancing. But we’ve called 
many things dancing. Even wars 
were choreographed 
until machines got involved. 
Five days, I’ll marinate in P-Town, 
ducking the people who hope
to see me. Most are disturbed 
by the errors I’ve made. 
Like mistaking laughter for ardor
or ardor for a platonic coziness. 
When the campaign ended, I discovered 
someone breathing in my ear. 
After that, the rains started, 
Siberian elms sprouted everywhere, 
and the waiter arrived with a plateful 
of oysters. Imagine! And a champagne 
mignonette! It must have been the anniversary 
of some important convergence.
Once I watched a rainbow end in a field 
filled with black-and-white cows. 
Is it possible we could touch that mystery? 
Or would it dissolve like that ghost
of a girl who wandered into my room 
and came close to see what I was? 
When I reached to see what she was, 
she broke into a mist of color.
A mist. Part missed and part massed, 
part mast and part list–an aid 
to memory, a foundering ship.

A Note on the Poetry

While it’s true I can’t reach 
where the flowers are, other paths 
lead straight to that place
where announcements originate–
the pledge and the naming
of the student of the week, 
the fourth grader describing 
the cheese we can expect 
should we still be hungry, 
the new rules on parking
and the storage of household 
poisons. You think the flowers 
are a metaphor for the soul, 
but they are actual flowers, 
the rare cornflower-blue ones 
that grow only on the mysterious
Islets of Langerhans, where 
bagpipe music shrills the air 
and the townsfolk dance
like they’re in a Breughel painting. 
The poets are searching for 
duende, but someone forgot
to tell them he’s a goblin, a trickster,
who shows up after the show 
to stack the chairs on the tables 
and sweep up. That’s why 
in the morning, your poem 
tastes like sawdust and the tinnitus 
kicks in, making everything
rattle like a swarm of cicadas. 
Don’t even ask. You can’t 
get there from here–the lava 
will shred your feet, and the air 
is thick with locusts. El duende 
wears wooden shoes and plays
a squeezebox. Even if you’d written 
that poem, you wouldn’t hear it 
over the clomp and scuttle of the real.

Jon Davis is the author of, most recently, Above the Bejeweled City (2021) and Fearless Now and Nameless (forthcoming in March, 2025), both from Grid Books. He performs with Clap the Houses Dark (clapthehousesdark.com), a poetry + rock band whose first album was released in September. He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Poems are just out or forthcoming in Tampa Review, Plume, Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Raleigh Review, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. jondavispoet.com

BACK

ISSUE tHREE HOME