The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

From “Frost Fragments,” a series composed of lines and fragments from poems by Robert Frost

What to Make of a Diminished Thing

We love the things
we love for what

they are.
Do me

no hurt.
There is a house

that should have been
a quarry.

There is a singer
everyone has heard.

And that for flowers
leaves are old.

(Hyla Brook, Away!, Directive, The Oven Bird)

Earnest Love

Life is too much like a pathless wood
where your face burns 

broken across it
and one eye is weeping

not to return. 
Rabbit and deer

running away
are light as balloons.

Anything more than the truth
makes them shed crystal shells.

Like girls on hands and knees 
before them over their heads

to have some boy bend them
was never a sound.

The lack of sound
into my face

I may load and unload
where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon

and could not do without 
and keep its Christmas.

(Mowing, Gathering Leaves, Birches, Christmas Trees)

I Meant, You Meant

The chance I missed in life 
ever since rivers 
were at last driven wrinkled
to reach the ocean
if I was not to speak of it to you 
it will not do to say. 

One drop fell from a fern 
to carry
our minds on.

I lost it.

It asks a little of us here
but it runs away,
it seriously, sadly, runs away.

(To E.T.; West-Running Brook; Choose Something Like a Star; For Once, Then, Something)

ASHLEY CAPPS received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has published a book of poems, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields. The recipient of poetry fellowships from the Iowa Arts Council, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she works as a writer, editor and researcher for the the food and climate justice non-profit A Well-Fed World, and the animal rights non-profit Free from Harm. She is at work on a second collection of poems entitled The FOReSt. With the poet Allison Titus, she is co-editing THE NEW SENT(I)ENCE, an animal poetry anthology forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2024.

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