The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

Gacela of Non Sequiturs

I’m tired of talking about rivers, trees, childhood, 
missing children. I’m tired of news pornography,
the way everyone after work, or on break, sits down
to sip the poisoned tea of climate catastrophe. 
I avert my eyes from strangers at the grocery store 
where I pay seven dollars for a cauliflower. A cauliflower.
This is the way our silver passes, hand to hand, 
into the coffers of our Emperors leaving us widowed.
I grow old, I grow old, but my father is older still—
I call him, and he talks expertly about the weather,
better than a meteorologist. Did you see the game?
Days empty like bank accounts. Happy New Year!
Art renews the algorithyms of heart and mind. 
I love putting gas in my car on cold mornings,
the way I cease to exist as the pump hoovers up 
all my money. I no longer read new poets, 
having learned all I can of misery, fidelity, failure.
I listen to indie music. Its bright shiny ouroboros.
Do you ever think of me? I think this looking
at the black birds on the telephone wire,
at the cars passing me on wintry country roads,
at the portrait of the young doctor Keats,
at the hand-drawn, sketch-book illustration of me, 
a shadowy kid who kept a copy of Lorca’s
Gacela of the Dark Death on his apartment door,
and who would secretly be thrilled by this poem,
even though no one else would hammer a nail 
through these words, or hang this Gacela of 
Non Sequiturs to a front door of an apartment
except maybe him. Except maybe me.

Matériel

What is your poetry about, anyways? is a real question 
with no instruction manual. There is just this body 
stoppered with blood, a pulse frolicking in slo-mo 
under this rib-cage, and maybe an ATM machine 
spilling out its ration of dollar bills, melancholy,
every week. My aesthetics are complicated. I tend
to orbit the ordinary, until a dam breaks, and voila!
a little knowing spills out. Rumour has it the moon
has never ridden a bicycle! Imagine never kissing 
a person in the rain ever! Somebody needs to help 
remove these invisible electrodes wired to my skull 
sending electric shocks, euphoria, through my brain 
every time I approximate surprise, or yell, Hey Universe!
I am not scared of you! Is this surreal or placebo? More 
and more, I do not feel obliged to explain myself. Did 
I work and make money? Yes. Did I build a ladder to 
the stars? Yes. How long did it take you? Until now.
What did you find? Peace of mind; pieces of my mind.
Enough to fill a few books. To seesaw with illusions.
Alas, I cannot read the bottom line of Enlightenment.
Is it okay to answer your initial question with my own 
glossary of strangeness? This being the first page, and
the last one. If you read it, you know my explanation,
although lacking, has more sparrows in it than personal 
information. They fly, little messengers, between us.

Gospel Truth

In the beginning, there were polar bears. No, 
there was light. Maybe an age of dinosaurs. No, 
in the beginning there was God’s mumbling. 
A babble of magical thinking. Then God died,
or went away. Out of chaos, came civilizations:
rivers, pyramids, empires. Fig trees planted in
the Jordan Valley. If only we stopped there,
but soon demons and angels pushed us out of
Eden. What next? Dark ages, printing presses, 
gun powder, astrolabes and European sailors 
sailing past edges of water-logged maps seeking 
spices. Gold. Next, Darwin and evolution. 
Iguanas and adaptive finches. Marx’s Das Kapital. 
Skip two World Wars, but mark the Holocaust.
Now, it’s social media and electric cars. Netflix
comedy specials, and climate armageddon. Polar bears
on ice floes. In the beginning, there was light.
In the end, our progeny will suffer. Unlike God,
I cannot connect everything. I went to the mountain. 
I stole fire. I picked a shining apple. Now, I wait 
for the polar bears to make a comeback. The world
a gospel of blasphemies according to me.

What You Might Say of Space And Time

is that they do not live easily together on a white page,
or for that matter, in a universe constantly expanding
like one’s waistband after thirty, although the eggheads
tell me they are aspects of the same entity ‘Space-Time” 
which sounds like a ride at an amusement park rather 
than an idea written in 1908 by Herman Minkowski. 
His student Albert Eienstein took it a few steps further 
with Relativity and MC² and marrying his cousin. So 
what does this have to do with Flamin’ Hot Doritos,
space telescopes, or feeling like you are still seventeen?
Depending on who you ask, the Big Bang or Eden
is ground zero for time and space and what came after:
poodle skirts, Cadillacs and Kardashians. Gravity is
a distortion of space-time, but so is writing a poem
condensing the world to a nutshell, to a grape, to seven
or eight billion people dancing on the head of a pin.  
Space-time does not exist without two things—matter
and energy—which is what my body is composed of, 
so does that make me a scientist or a poet? I travel easily 
across time reading Jack Gilbert in the kitchen, drinking 
morning coffee, thinking about Greece thirty years ago.
The raki watered down. The beaches soft white sand.
Space is harder to define. I keep thinking of hedgerows
and neighbours. Ticky tacky houses multiplying beside
farms. Developers taking an X-acto knife to GreenBelts.
The Universe expanding like Jiffy Pop, like prostate cancer, 
like buildings in an architect’s mind. Okay, so I am not 
a scientist, but the point is I’m not wrong about space-time
warping its cosmic-grid around me. Or about thoughts
not being material or physical objects, but cognitive maps 
manifesting reality. Or about smug astronauts, orbiting
the planet in a tin-can space station, aging more slowly than 
the rest of us with our feet planted firmly on earth.

Time and Words

It’s complicated. I mean my relationship with time.
How I am both a man with a medium-sized house, 
and a kid wiping dew off his pant legs after stealing
six pears from a farmer raging on his front porch.
The seconds tick past like a thin thread holding me
to the present, but then Wham! I’m a boy scout 
at a Jamboree covered in wood ticks. I’m a teenager
holding a six pack of beer around a bonfire singing
Dirty Old Town by The Pogues. I’m a divorcee
missing my children, trying to bait Oblivion’s kiss 
by drinking alone in a dull basement. I suppose 
my heart is a four-chamber vessel pumping blood, 
but also a typhoon of red tulips, a laboratory animal, 
an arsenal of trained butterflies, a God antennae,
a cauldron filled with archangels, hell-fire, so it is not
just time I’m two-timing but I guess language too. 
Words are a disguise for experience. I wrap them 
around the impossible beauty of this world but
then what? I keep waiting for someone to tell me
to stop arguing with my soul, or that I have a soul,
and not just this inner pirate radio signal on loop.
But seriously, I feel less like a human being, and
more like a constellation of words and instances,
and you, dear reader, are just one person at the end
of a very long telescope, staring deeply into my life
so even you can see my love of Blake, space flicks,
Korean food. So even you in your white lab coat, 
writing notes in long-hand, can see that time and 
words, they get things all wrong the right way.

CHRIS BANKS Banks is a Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator forthcoming from Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, Sonora Review, American Poetry Journal, among other publications. He lives and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.

ISSUE Two HOME