The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

The Arrangement

The arrangement seems made to measure.
There’s sky in ocean, and water in sky
as clouds rain down into waves
and foam evaporates.

There are also atolls, islands, entire continents,
and jellyfish, humans, goats, penguins, ocelots,
a universal frenzy
of predation, reproduction, and habitational flux.
 
No one knows precisely how to feel about it
or how to accomplish or forestall
the next arrangement 
which all sorts of people try to do
in mostly incompatible ways—
sages, magicians, academics, warriors,
politicians, scientists, priests, 
 
and maybe even the aliens or angels
who infiltrated so long ago
from such a great distance
that they had to set up 
an identity check protocol:

when they encounter each other on the street,
one of them has to say, You’re not from here
and the other must respond, 
You’re not from here, either.

The Work

You must never cease turning hatred
back into that pain 
from which it continually rises, 
cools, begins to set—
keep breaking it up, 
feeding it like bread to the heart
with bare and burning hands, 
pressing it down, holding it under 
to re-liquefy, grow molten, glow 
until the heart complains, 
I thought you were on my side. 
Why take pain’s part?
It is for love,
by far the brighter hurt.

Cat Triptych

The Bite Inside the Cat 
 
The bite inside the cat
is never absent or inactive;
it merely bides its time.

The bite inside the cat
exists for itself alone,
possessing no reverence for its object.

The bite inside the cat
is not the cat,
though neither is it separate from the cat;
 
simultaneously inhabiting each of its hosts
it deploys itself bit by bit,
patient, sparing, precise,
 
yet if all the cats
in all the world
were to sink their fangs
into whatever is 
nearest at hand,
 
the universal bite
would not be
in the least
diminished.
 

Night Hunt with Feline

By lamplight, she leaps, I swat, stalking the mosquito's outsize shadow, a spindly bristling bundle of darkness that rises and falls as tsunamis of air overflow each resting place it finds.  
 
Both of us are equipped with the forward-facing eyes of predators. She attacks because it's in motion and considerably smaller than her; I  attack because I abhor all vampires, even miniature ones.  

In my nightgown and bare feet,  she flowing grayly at my side, I finally understand the primal connection, why grown men weep when they lay their hunting dogs to rest in the earth.  

Tonight, she and I are going to bring this sucker down. 


Cat in the Garden: Aftermath
 
Surveying the wreckage that had been her web,
the spider instructs her brood now scattered
through the boxwood shrub like infinitesimal stars:
Prey that bulky is tempting but problematic.

CLAIRE BATEMAN is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently, WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD (42 Miles Press). Her hybrid collection, THE PILLOW MUSEUM is forthcoming from FC2 in January 2025. She has received two Pushcart awards and a NEA grant, and is the two-time winner of the New Millennium Award in Poetry.

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