The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

ENVOY

Raised a level far beyond my abilities
I have to meet an African king
Of a decently powerful country tomorrow.

Just time to eat, sleep, and dress—
No time to shop for him.
I’ll be alone on the small swift plane

Except for my guard, a bed, and my gift
For the king.  I am not to shop for it,
It has to be an existing precious possession.

I’ve decided to bring two gifts, one
My active Rolodex, filled, and one
One of my precious beliefs, to be delivered
Orally.  The guard says this will work,
It will be beyond pleasing.  We’re
About to land and the guard says the king
Will be on the tarmac.  I put on
My black sports jacket over my best red shirt
And black pants.  The king’s English
Is as good as mine.  He receives the Rolodex gently
And instructs an aide to put it on the royal night table,
Bedside.  Then he asks for weapons,
Specifically the M4 assault rifle, the MK19 grenade launcher,
And the Tow anti-tank missile,
And I say wait a minute, let me write this down,
And wait a minute, how about my
Personal second gift to you?  He smiles and holds
His arms open for an embrace.

It is like stepping between two muscular panthers the size
Of big arms but his embrace is gentle.
I step back and say I’m going to give him
One of my precious beliefs, lend me an ear,
Which I step to his side for.
A plane is taxi-ing past to take off and
We can barely hear each other
So the king makes an arm motion to his aide like
A sign language arm and the aide runs to the
Plane and makes a motion that’s like sign
Language for the deaf to the pilot and
All the planes in the airport shut off
Their engines.  We have to wait for the massive whining
To stop and then the king motions me to his ear.
I whisper the last 6 lines of Prufrock
And the first 3 lines of Hamlet.
No one knows both!  but
Is it any wonder that he’s a king!   I mean he’s
Pissed now, but doesn’t show it.  He asks for more weapons,
Specifically the M270 rocket launcher and the Atlas V launch vehicle,
And “Those I previously asked you for, please.”
Also, he says, before you tell them
What I want, tell them I am giving them a gift,
A regift of your precious belief, delivered
In each of their ears.  How many of them
Will there be?  he asks.  Well, there were
Four in the room when I got my assignment,
I said.  OK, he said, you do that
In their ears first, and announce it as my gift to them,
And then ask for the five weapons,
Exactly 70 of each.  I thought to myself, OK, I can try that,
And away I went, on the small swift plane.

THE FOREST

The specter was too nice and too familiar with me
To be anybody else.
It did nothing I wouldn’t do except squeeze
Behind doors opened nearly to the wall,
Easing into that six-inch space.
A ghost is a cliché.  It was not.  It was a specter that lived in.
We hardly spoke.  I didn’t, would you?
It didn’t, same as me.  We
Had done roughly the same reading, lifetime
(I forgot to say I was 26 when the specter hung out
With me) but we each had done a lot of reading
Nevertheless, and the specter was 26 too.
He spoke to me (how rare!) about the Romans
Who I knew a lot about, who, we said simultaneously
(So I spoke to him too) spoke Latin daily
And when they wanted to express the imaginary
Concept of a ghost or specter they said larva.*
“Holy Shit” (pardon, he was 26) the specter said,
“Caterpillar-butterfly!  Tadpole-frog!  Grub-moth!”
And I interrupted and we said in chorus “maggot-fly.”
Then we sang “Us, us, us!”
In the National Geographic frogs are often red
And green, with facial expressions.  The butterflies on my property
(I’m not sure it was the specter’s too—
His name was not on the lease,
He didn’t seem to have a name)
Are variegated and float and
Sail.  There was a stack of eight years
Of the National Geographic behind one of the doors.
A butterfly of a unique tan we could not, despite putting our two heads
Together, could not describe the exquisite tan,
Just this afternoon lit on the top National Geographic
And I cupped it in my hands so as not to grab it or squeeze
It (I was as fast as the specter)
And let it out of my hands out where the trees began.
Which left in our constantly combining minds                   
The maggots and that no fly is beautiful ever.
The specter and I wept and wept when he walked into the trees
That at that time covered much of North America.

*Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, Dorset & Baber, 1983, p. 1023.

MY GIRL

I was shopping for a castle.
You do it by word of mouth.
Some friend of some acquaintance will have one
Or two, but you must be discreet, be
Sure the acquaintance has the
Connection, or he’ll think you’re a nut.
A castle or two is rarely for sale somewhere.
The guy said buy both of mine for sale or no soap, neither
Comes alone.  One is in Scotland,
The other in Turkey.
I didn’t have enough money for two, besides
What would somebody do with two castles?
My girlfriend said she’d convince the owner to sell her just one,
Leaving the other to me.
Ouch.
I was counting on her for good advice only,
And I screwed up, bad judgment.
Does your girlfriend want a castle?  Ha!
Well mine thought it was okay for me
To be in Turkey for a month and her to be
In Scotland that month.  So, I say to her,
At the parties we throw (and having parties
In a castle is the point of owning a castle)
At the parties who will be our dates?
We’ll pick good ones, she says.
I untied the knot of looming disaster I had made—
I said forget the Turkey castle, you
Get the Scotland one, and I’ll stick with you.
Oh darling, she says, how grand of you
To think of this.  Next I tried to shop
For a castle near her Scottish castle,
Aggressively and secretly and persistently shopped,
But there were none for sale
So I secretly went to Turkey and paid the jerk.

The moral—
Better to have a full-time girlfriend, lots of
Acquaintances and friends, and live year round
In a house in Southern California
Than to shop for a castle
When you secretly own an empty one in Turkey
And live in one in Scotland.

Postscript—
Even after a month in residence my girl and I had not
Visited all her castle’s rooms
And on our last day
After an extensive self-guided tour
We opened a door
To a dead man on the floor
Obviously stabbed lots recently.
The police believed it was murder.
Nobody stabs themselves to death.
I said the perpetrator might have been a ghost
Since that’s what ghosts do silently with ghost knives
And we didn’t hear anything untoward
The whole month.  Shut up, my girl said,
They don’t want to hear that.
I had wanted a castle in the first place
So I could say anything I wanted in it,
But she was right, I wasn’t thinking
When I said it to the police.

“WHICH-A-WAY”

In western Kansas or in northern Kansas
There is a town, or it could have been in southern Kansas,
That I drove to on a mission for the state
Which mission I knew inside
And out, but especially inside.
Those to be secularly converted were farmers (rich),
Clerks, house fraus, and a cowboy
And a sheriff, and some etceteras.  They all had the same accent.
It wasn’t Southern, it wasn’t Texas cowboy,
It wasn’t that flat Midwestern puff and wail.
It was like the educated hick accent in Wichita where I
Drove from, my household temporarily permanent for three years.
The far town sits near two streams.  The smallest steel
Bridge for a car I’d ever seen crosses
The water to the town.  My accent was a radio announcer’s,
My mission was uniquely mine and
What it had to do with anything.  In my case
What it had to do with everything.  Boy,
Did they like it.  They told the state.
“Here’s the thing,” they said about me to the
Commissioner,  “he lets us do what we want
On our way to each of our individual
Selves, meanwhile he takes us to heaven.  We think
It’s his heaven, but so what, we want
Him to come back to our town again, at the
Same price, tho it’s a little high.”  Each
Of the towns (there were eight and they were
All over the state I now remember)—
Once I said “reckymember” to them in my fake Gabby Hayes accent—
Each of the eight towns
Had the classes begin after 5 so it was dark when they were over.
And I drove thereupon for three hours I drove and drove home and drove
Through the neolithic-black, manganese-oxide-black night
(Driving in the dark while frightened was and is my specialty I now think)
Drove to my longtime temporary household and a human being asleep who knew
As much as me about what I said in class
Including the part I told them about driving into the dark forever
But she did not know the part about eight times
Gliding surely over a twenty-foot-wide bottomless lake of ink

ARTHUR VOGELSANG‘s books of poetry are A Planet (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1983), Twentieth Century Women (University of Georgia Press, 1988), which was chosen by John Ashbery for the Contemporary Poetry Series, Cities and Towns (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), which received the Juniper Prize, Left Wing of a Bird (Sarabande Books, 2003), Expedition: New & Selected Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2011), and Orbit (Pitt Poetry Series, 2016). He is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships. Most of his professional life he was an Editor/Publisher of The American Poetry Review. He lives in Los Angeles with his filmmaker wife, Judith.

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