The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

The Breakup: Kentucky Dam, 1980

1.

It was September, one of those nights
the moon would leave nothing alone.
I parked the car beside the water
and waited while your face composed
its intricate silver in that light. 
Anything we might have thought to say
would have only affirmed a loss
already felt; so instead we let
the distant rush of the lake
becoming a river be enough.

2.

It is spring here. The first full light
of the morning shocks the cold earth to green.
The coffee before me is cupped flame,
dark as the thrush that just a moment
ago closed his gnarled feet around
a high-voltage wire across the street
and sang—unaware of the power
that ran so close. He flew away,
not needing it. Were memory only
that lyrical, that fleeting…

3.

…I would not have to think, now,
of that moonlight and the way
the water seemed to swell to meet it,
each entering the other in shapes
so frail the rising of a lone fish
could have shattered them irrevocably;
now of how, when the sky whitened
and our faces told us it was time
to go, each shaken leaf of each
tree we passed seemed to say so long.

4.

I was eighteen then, and scared of what
I didn’t know—which was a lot.
And now, as I look out the window
of an apartment on the east side
of a city where the sound of church
bells and the sound of trains are both
numinous to me, it would be wrong
to say I’ve learned much, or that the ordeal
of distance and years which divide me
from our parting has solved anything.

5.

I rise, I fall, I watch the wasted
boxcar of today drifting into
tonight go by. What song is it
I keep remembering the words to,
but not the tune? And the eastern sky
deepens as if to hold each house
in its big blue hands, then lets them go,
as the mouth of what could be the past
or the future opens dark and wide.

JOE BOLTON was born in 1961. He published three collections of poems, including Breckenridge Suite, Days of Summer Gone, and The Last Nostalgia, this last edited by Donald Justice. He died, a victim of suicide, in 1990. 42 Miles Press is publishing an uncollected poems of Joe Bolton in the near future.

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