Poems from the past.
Crow, Restless
What meanness makes crow caw
filthy crow jokes
to his crow boys,
inciting the unnerved robins in the deep of maple leaves
to a loose-winged
flutter and thrash?
What oddity, what shimmering, what mix
of small pleasures
does crow demand?
What is
rich brew
to a crow?
What spice drives crow
sqcaw sqcaw sqcaw
from the telephone line?
What augury
in road-kill
does crow read?
Do the curdled intestines
of the marble-eyed cat
speak mysteries
beyond the glittering pea of the moment,
does squirrel’s
tiny suitcase of brains, popped open
under the thunder-mill of the eighteen-wheeler,
spill forth
the sparkling hour to come?
Crow: what rouses you?
--John Glowney
Boys In A Speeding Car, Late August, 1969
They came loaded as a faulty shotgun; they came
lit up on beer, looking for girls, looking
for a little pot, past Shepardsville and Chapin,
where the river unwinds the mercies of its history,
past Durant, Corunna, past Owosso,
past beet fields and rain-spoiled hayfields
into the country of those who picked up
and left, past the dust that has given up
and lies on its back on the roads, past
red barns strewn across the landscape, white
farm houses holding one book, a bible weighing
17 pounds; they came to escape
soil rich as tears, to roar through August
like a blast of wedding music, they came
to knock down mailboxes and stop signs,
to ride through this darkness of corn stalks
and silos shouting “shiiiit” and “pusssy”
at the top of their lungs;
they came ready for the army and the factory, for deer-hunting
and three kids in a double-wide, ready
for the truck without headlights, the boss
and the bills and the busted backs, the locked
doors and the steady drip of the mortgage in the night,
not suspecting the future had been replaced
and these roads were even then miles ahead
of them, turning back.
--John Glowney
Golden
Time was all the distance that mattered: a blue sky
low over lush bean rows freckled with wild yellow mustard,
brothers sunburned somewhere beyond noon,
beyond the wide waves of green wheat roiling in hot bursts,
the baled tufts of clover, timothy that will overflow the hay mow.
Barefoot, we pulled the wide summer
through the afternoon’s mill on our rushing feet,
we waded into the dusty evening delta,
tearing from the soft black soil the tall, prickly stalks,
dispatching that irreplaceable twilight with our hands.
This was the back and forth of leaving, we thought,
the rehearsal of growing up. Nothing since,
whenever I leave the house early
for the office, and pass a half-hearted garden
of daffodils, a stand of sunflowers tilted into a fence,
or I notice the camellia wetly bursting into blossom,
can match the prospect of a field awaiting a day of weeding.
I will forever breath the golden flower of what we rooted out.
--John Glowney
Learning A Trade
Taught the mercy of butchering
the lame cow,
schooled that what is not useful
is waste,
we wised up, staggered
out of bed,
began earlier,
rubbing the dark
from our eyes. We worked
sun down to chaff,
shavings, stalks
discarded, stub-ends, the peelings
fed to swine, day unbuckled
from dawn,
laid all the fields
open, let in
as much light as the fences
would take,
lugged frayed bundles
of leaves, scraped
the branches raw,
cut the dull plow
into the stony reservoir
of topsoil, stored enough
to starve in the spring.
We shouldered up to the haunches
of the best milk-cows
in their stalls, milk flowing
and pulsing
into silver cans, slopped
the dregs, straddled
drought’s dwindling
ruts, roads
to next to nothing, a bog
of stinking water,
black sky floating there,
an end, flies
milling above. The nub
of not enough
our rough apprenticeship.
---John Glowney
On the Beach in Bucereas
the fire of noon
nests in even the littlest pebbles
the tide tenderly herds
under an updraft of frigate birds.
Each cobblestone
in front of the corner grocery
burns like a sun.
The heat circles the cold beer bottles
on the sidewalk tables
like a swarm of bees.
I shade your face
with my straw hat.
--John Glowney
Kick-the-Can
And sometimes, when it was too late
to do anything,
we hid in the lilac bushes beside the garage,
and I would run my hand over the map
of your skin, its tapestry
of bark, stars, roots,
seeds.
Card games in brightly lit kitchens
were swallowed up in cigarette smoke.
Screen doors squeaked on the unoiled decades.
Televisions were mutant, radioactive creatures
glowing in picture windows.
The twilight scattered
into the neighborhood yards, and sprinklers
hissed and hissed in the shallow dark,
a thousand leaves folded together
like water.
This was in the heat of the evening.
This was too late for the swallows.
This is how summer ended
in the cold shadow of the frame house,
how the moon was lost in the grass
and we got up in our tennis shoes
and ran for it.
--John Glowney
From the Book of Common Office Prayers
Let’s go where moths go for a smoke break,
or take a mental health day
with the accountants on pilgrimage
among the stub ends of pencils.
Let’s schedule a vacation at the monastery
of unpaid invoices,
or take a long lunch sipping martinis
with penguins
singing medieval drinking songs.
Let’s lie down
in the quiet room so we can hear
a golden pheasant
slipping through a white picket fence
into green thickets.
Let’s use up our sick leave
among the last wisps of breezes,
or take some personal time
in pollen’s sideways drift.
Let’s take a sabbatical and travel a year
with the sawdust,
or find a cheap apartment in the neighborhood
of the moment
the birds startle into silence
and work
on our novel. Let’s take a cruise
on the good ship
Two Week’s Notice.
Dear god, let’s quit.
--John Glowney
Accident
It was an accident in transit
when the souvenir of our trip,
a colorful china hen with a corn-meal
yellow body mottled with green
peppers, a persimmon-red wattle,
broke in the luggage and lay there,
like a marriage after it has gone bad,
the pieces held in place by the folded
shirts and pants. We carried it
with us into our own country,
and declared it ours and since we
could not go back we glued it together
and placed it on a shelf in the kitchen
and while from a distance it looked
fine up close if you leaned in
you could see the long cracks
running everywhere.
--John Glowney
Woods Sleep
Fallen cornstalks tangle around my feet.
A canvas bag hangs across my back,
the dog inside stiffening. The woodlot's far corner
is quiet. I have never known the cows to stray
beyond the creek.
I found the dog dead behind the toolshed,
the last breath simply falling away
and not coming back:
a hawk circling off over a village,
a man disappearing over the far hilltop,
the mist slowly swallowing a road sign.
Nothing changed. Cobwebs still grew in the barn
as if the beams were leaking threads, thunderheads
still bloomed like black roses on the horizon,
the farm still rose in the morning
and set at night.
Dragging the bag,
I crawl under the barbed wire fence.
I may have to break the legs
so the body will fit the grave.
--John Glowney
Ulysses in the Underworld
Saturday morning, overcast, rain all night,
the parking garage cool, damp,
the pigeon-grey echo of my footsteps flutters
through the great volume of cement and steel.
I hurry through this dungeon of automobiles,
a buried public gloom,
towards a desk of paperwork, the forming
realization a torch flaming
in my mind: our plight is the repetitive
ordinariness of our lives. The punishments
of minor tasks fill the brilliant minutes.
Trivialities, errands, work,
not love. Rows of dead headlights, a dull gleam
of hoods lost in shadows
like phantom kings stripped of golden robes,
faceless, unrelieved shades--how far
you can walk without an exit, the levels
circling back and back, the same cars parked,
the ceaseless darkness.
How extraordinary, the assurance of dawn,
to live in the cycle of hours under the sun
where the future might be imagined each day.
---John Glowney
The Prized Horse
1
On the back of your hand, a map of Bohemia.
On the back of your left hand, a family tree of veins,
faint blue rivers tracing into the foothills
of the Urals, villages with names
no one can remember the reason for.
Left behind: fat young pigs, laying hens,
the prized horse. The milk is no sweeter here,
the black bread still as hard as Russia. Death and
caution were grains of sand on the tip of your tongue.
As a child you knew God spoke your name
and all the candles in the church blew out:
a bear wind from over the steppe.
When you must move onto the next place,
God's grace, you said.
And a little money.
2
They move graceless as stone
through the midnight shift at Ford. In their teeth,
gold, silver: a life's savings. This is time and a half,
good times, nobody is going home,
nobody is leaving his machine. Women sleep
in the parking lot in station wagons
smelling of potatoes, lard, dough.
On break, the men smoke and talk
on the roof. The displaced light of the moon
has come a hundred years to join them. If you asked,
they would give it back, they would say
the lands beyond the sea, the uncalculated
soil, the hand's discontent.
--John Glowney
Swimming Lessons
Saturday mornings at the WAC pool.
The cathedral room, its ceiling
a promenade of spangled
reflections, dwarfs
and warms the shivery clusters
of bright bathing suits.
The littlest hug
the pool's edge,
while we parents retreat
to the comfort of newspapers
and coffee. They bob and cling
poolside, apprehensive,
unprepared by the narrow womb
for such wide waters. Do they fear
love dissolves in water, as
it does in time? Their tears sting
our hearts.
We assure them.
We offer the lessons
of our own unfathomable failures,
but before can explain
the little we learned by sinking,
that love ascends,
we have parted ways--
the instructor calls them,
and one by one they splash
noisily off the edge, breathless,
thrashing blindly, as
we all do, towards the far wall.
--John Glowney
The Trial Lawyer
In every story we tell in the courtroom, we have to win.
We have to! But opposing counsel, the judge, the facts---all
Work to hijack our work. Opposing counsel yips endlessly,
Tugs at your trouser-leg,
A persistent short-haired terrier. The judge,
A voice in a thunder-cloud, denying
This, over-ruling that. And the facts themselves,
Vital, independent, red-blooded, most like
The working-man with a firm handshake,
Who looks you straight in the eye and says
Do the right thing.
--John Glowney
On a Balcony Outside a Party in Ann Arbor
Men and women, mostly strangers, crowd into the kitchen
of a second story apartment (perfumed, unfamiliar bodies
touching from the shoulder to the ankle like lovers)
for the privilege of drinking beer from an aluminum keg.
There is no room to dance. Everyone is dancing. Flushed,
drunk, I have slipped away to stand here,
lost in thought, shivering a little, to touch
the powdered snow embroidered on the balustrade,
and to consider the full, blue, planet-streaked sky.
Up and down the street
cars wait at the curb like empty motel rooms,
and the houses are impenetrable, black pears
set out in the deep snow. There must be
a music for this austere silence,
this numb rapture, this cold,
cheerless concert of slow, orbiting spheres.
Beethoven once wrote to a friend
"..what will they think of me
on the star of Venus Urania, how will
they judge me without seeing me?"
I can only guess he sat up late each night
erasing notes and aligning harmonies,
pronouncing the blessing of the celestial,
giving voice to what he has lost
with what he cannot hear.
When someone opens the door,
out of the discord and into the glory
of old disintegrating stars pours the melody of voices
amid the revel of a hundred instruments.
--John Glowney
johnglowney.com 