The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

Ghosts Left Over

The truth of erasing is not everything goes away 
It’s still there faintly including the tiny heart 
I felt while fishing while drawing and the reef’s 
deep blue just making out carpet sharks and coral 
The bedroom window had two dreams at once 
the outside fading as inside took its place 
wishes flying off as the earth’s equator whirled 
wet dogs re demonstrating galaxies with ghosts 
left over and a dove’s tail quite unlike anything 
in woodwork

Teleology

Waiting is the space we fill with expectations 
Close as the next page for writers no accident 
that the craze for memoir should happen now 
We had all this and it’s slipping 
Something else will get smart after this extinction 
crows and octopus monopolized this time 
Park Place and Boardwalk of the air and water 
After us everything clever moves up

The Extravagant

I’m aware of things I don’t think I am 
I know something is missing at the edge 
of everything thanks to my macula 
I know peptides change my intentions 
I know there’s a worm that blocks lymph 
and the leg grows and the testicle 
to enormous proportions and all this 
is evidence the extravagant and unlikely 
are possible which means for us inevitable

Perspectives

Cathedrals are shaped to hope 
said to exist in the upper altitudes 
but archworks and spires are graphs 
of vanishing  Form denies trying 
At a window you focus through yourself 
hoping to see beyond the curiosities 
like books remembering for us 
rich histories as if we had been there once 
singing plainsong dressing cut stone 
chasing foxes with spotted dogs 
professing aspiration in text  falling short 
observing clouds that could hardly wait 
to get past us

ALLAN PETERSON‘s most recent book is This Luminous, New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Some other titles include Precarious, finalist for The Lascaux Prize; All the Lavish in Common, winner of the Juniper Prize, and Fragile Acts, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has appeared in anthologies such as “American Poetry At the End of the Millennium,” “Poetry of the American Apocalypse,” (Green Mountains Review), and in critical essays in Stephanie Burt’s “The Poem is You, 60 Contemporary Poets and How to Read Them.” He lives and writes in Ashland, Oregon. Website: www.allanpeterson.net

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