The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

The Speaker Meditates on Her Degree

What the blue-gray gnatcatcher calls or how
the red-eyed vireo trills or osprey drops out
of the sky--.
You aren’t human the children say
Humans are bad
You’re an unhuman human
And there’s the black-capped chickadee
the bad secret caught in the green forest’s
darkening slate.  Nightly Sirens Nightly Sirens and the drainage ditch Owl
hooing through them with its soul of wood.
Trees are good Trees don’t
Make war against trees
Trees don’t tirade
And the petals piling shamefully--
dogwood blooms a little dirty in the central yellow eye--
nobody telling what they saw--
The brain of the tree is in its trunk
And you re-clasped the alcoholic screen
door and you disheveled
the sheets--.
 
 
Where is the address of the dark?
The children take a pin and another against themselves.
Does hurt make a forest?
A cold still pond.
It nearly broke into you.
It couldn’t settle anywhere.
There was no outpouring of birds or jackals.
A hushed throat between trees.
Stamped by a black star.
The children's Hanging Man was pencil, the letters below him ink
You were too scared to breathe you let
the magnolia’s root burrow under the house.
Whose shadow is the one that doesn’t sink?
Yellow mystery, red cruelty.
The Empire of Love is not actual it is 
imperiled. Whose rain will rise?
You wept into a leaf, your ribs were branches
The mind betrays the body and vice versa
“I have to bury a child” someone said from the copier behind you
while you photocopied Mysteries of Small Houses
The blinds in that place slit the light, botched the shadow
The terrified eyes of angelic clouds
On Jupiter it rains diamonds
It hurts to stand outside
Yarrow, my beloved
Yarrow, my resilient yellow archive
My pacifist arsenal.
The children are crying, calling from upstairs--

Here is your Doctorate for the Unspeakable

Witnessing It: The Voice Asks the Speaker Another Question

Why are you sitting outside in the snow without a coat?
---I want to witness it

If you don’t--?
---I have to watch it at the critical moment or how will I know that it happened

When the last splint cracks
and the thing is disemboweled
and it lies heavy on the ground

---No p.s., no whisper…
while the green flies rummage and bustle  			

---while the woodpeckers, the doves…

get to the hollow places, they are
---getting to the hollow spaces but not for naught

There’s as much life in dead wood as there is in the living
---and the hollow where that gnarled arm was?

Becomes a clearing--

Remember when you stayed awake all night to watch the Luna moth take off in first flight? 

---Those hours, those agonizing, speckled hours, it twitched and strained
				its wings like leaflets in low wind,
				staggering and spinning over the ground 
				below the young maple

PAUSE

---I didn’t sleep
No,  but in that minute you looked away—
---split minute, immeasurable
				as a splinter of glass--

then it finally flew
				past the young maple’s dead leaves

---where grubs live!
And the wild snail rests…

Two Voices Dispute Harmony Harmoniously

“To harmonize the whole--the task in art.”
---You’ve been thinking of Kandinsky? Surges of yellow, blemished reds?

Blue horses, gashed hooves--
---but the music--almost Shostakovich--music in those shapes.

Where are we?
---Our Speaker’s “living” room….

Look at that painting, torn-up greens, charcoals weepy above their mantel.
---The fireplace-- over the decades-- was mouthy with flame just twice.

Just twice mouthy with flame while Kandinsky’s colors roaringly whipped above, that wildness
---packed in a frame, a heavy golden glotted frame.

Who placed it there?
---Who nailed it?

They couldn’t nail “to harmonize the whole”… there were four separate rooms
---for the four separate people of the house the most dissonant being…?

She, the wife, the bearer of harmonies and High News, our Speaker!
---Four in the house. One moves and the others need to sway….

At least sway / at least roll up to her / at least query / or contend / or fight / at least touch
---even for a minute before dashing off

sway into the separate quarters
of the Heart.

We’re moving fluidly from room to room much like Nightingale’s concerned lanterns….
---Here is the child with the stitched-up mouth, dark hole for an eye.

Here is the child, his barricare of books, green windows.
---Here is the adult-child tight-wound in a cold sheet.

Here is the child, the last child, our Speaker, curled around four blankets,
one sheet sheared into three—

---the very “picture of neglect” --why aren’t they

holding each other why aren’t they in sync why aren’t they eating meals together
---or heading to the park or the church or the field why aren’t they

looking into each other’s eyes? Why are there four children, not two--?
---Why has nobody taken care?

Kandinsky was talking about art-- not
---harmony among them

That’s their own lonely business, their own
---ferocity

to handle--

[It felt, I mean, I could hear Voices, thousands of them]

Can we travel beyond this white fountain to the tiny stream of childhood
…where she pillaged stones from the water to clear passage?

Must there be harm to clear passage?
…Seems inevitable.

And now the shameful moss thickens—“white on hanging wire.”
…Did the thousand voices emanate from the stinkbug she smashed?

Everything tasted stinkbug--coffee, oatmeal, even the water
…the tiny stream from childhood?

She doused her hands in it, but never drank, it was a trickle.
….What were the voices saying when you weren’t human?

Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry
…Can we take those sorries to the woods, to the tiny stream, can we

excise them? Expunge? Every mouthful of world she takes she tastes stinkbug
…Did its spirit fly into her mouth as she slept? Were the four gunshots that woke her a signal?

We’d rather the bells from stone churches--
…Rather the trains in snow--

In chorus: WE KNOW NOTHING

Why did they yank the children from their tiny streams, 
…so they couldn’t scream…. Did she become the thing she smashed?

The stinkbug?  
…Too neat an equation.

The white fountain thinks so hard its water crenellates
…and I wish hard for Snow--Eternal Zhivago Snow.

Hasn’t this before been your wish? Or is it mine?
…Ours, dearheart, as every exchange, as who-says-what is essentially moot.

Is the stinkbug taste fading?
…It’s more of her life rushing in--

ALESSANDRA LYNCH is the author of four books of poetry. Her third book Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment was one of the NY Times’ ten best books of poetry in 2017; it was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award and a winner of the Balcones Prize. Her fifth collection Wish Ave will be published in October 2024 by Alice James Books. Alessandra’s work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. In May 2021, she was a featured blogger for Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books. She has been given residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Lannan Foundation. Currently, Alessandra serves as poet in residence at Butler University.

BACK

ISSUE two HOME