Truth
I’ve accumulated months and years of it,
stuffed it into little drawers
and cannisters, tins and jewelry boxes,
crammed decades of it into trunks
and cartons and crates. And I was sitting
at the kitchen table making a list
when the Past strolled in the back door
and started in bitching about some insult
or slight from some party or barbeque
in 1973 nobody can even remember.
And the kids keep running in and out,
blinding light sprayed everywhere like water
from a sprinkler, and a house wren
on the lawn, asking nothing, and the tall spruce
beside the hedge, asking nothing,
the kids getting a drink of water
at the sink, laughing, making some crazy plan
for the afternoon, something to do
with string and popsicle sticks they’ve just
invented, letting the screen door slam,
tracking in dirt, running through
all that empty space, all that light.
--John Glowney
Visitation (The Baltimore Review)
Break It, You Own It
Honestly, though, it was always broken,
which is the whole point, that is to say,
when this world first whirled
and popped into existence
out of nothing’s sticky grasp,
the ur-broken thing, when it had wings
that glinted wildly in the suffused
and charged plasma, when it cascaded off
the cliff of itself
a mountain waterfall in native sunlight;
when the newly minted
honey bees, still smoking a little from
the tiny forges that made their immaculate
and fragile bodies, shook the pollen-dust
of a violet, left a tell-tale film
on the velvety atoms of air,
when the first honey bees
so insisted upon new life they went
flower to flower--back when this world wanted
to be called Volcano of the Lilies,
not Rage Monster or Resentful Lover, not Plague Addict or
Reservoir of Ashes--even then, broken, yet fresh
with new blooms,
it was yours.
--John Glowney
Visitation (The New Ohio Review)
A Map of Australia
Hellish beauty--a map so crowded with fire
symbols they look like mushrooms
bunched along a tree root, or little geisha fans,
guitar picks, fish scales--red and yellow
clusters trimming a continent
with a ruffle of flame. A billion dead
animals littered over char, and abstracted
this way means I can’t actually see
the carcasses but they say they are
saving a few: arboreal koalas, evicted
from eucalypt woodlands, wallabies,
of the Macropodidae family,
as are the singed kangaroos, marsupials,
the big jacks
with their long limbs bound and taped
like a prize fighter’s hands.
I can’t bear to look at them, anyway,
the cattle lying down in the smoke,
the glossy black cockatoo,
the Wollemi pines, conifers really,
secret canyon of stragglers, Lazarus
taxa, diaspora of the Cretaceous,
the ashy small towns, the panic-
stricken mothers on the beach,
hurrying to snatch up the smallest
children, rushing into the surf,
into rowboats. They are all
so out of place, the shelters
collecting handmade
joey pouches, all these wild things,
in the arms of medics,
or volunteers,
or the cold, frantic sea.
(Visitaton)
johnglowney.com 