Heading North
A minute's meandering with a wily quill.
Taking the Garden State Parkway north
To a dentist appointment in Brooklyn,
I notice the cauldron of fogs at Cheesequake
Is all colors.
The mist makes my glasses cry.
I curse stubbornly,
Wiping them clean at the filling station
On the ratty, untucked hem of my shirt.
The ugly gears in my car
Wail and whine
Like rabbis at a smoky wall.
Somehow today, every day is too long to endure.
It's only later I remember, falling asleep
Under the pink floodlights of my apartment,
How this awkward swan,
Beating slowly, rose from the marsh
Out of the soft fogs, his dawn wings
Flashing sharply.
Gregg Glory
10/16/2008
Humiliation in a Green Meadow
This is what the sky keeps saying to me.
The sky crowds my shoulders
As I kick the stubborn tufts of grass in the field.
It's too blue, or something. I don't like
Living inside an eyeball.
It's going to take a very great person
To just stand there and love me.
Across the grass,
A gray squirrel emits it's chuk-chuk challenge
At a dog, head down on the ash trunk
Darkened by night rains.
The unmolested grass is long and wet.
I consider how the horses
Will come stand here all day,
And all night
And just take it.
Gregg Glory
10/16/2008
Cut Once
Fine advice from a doodler and witless whittler.
If you want to live in a civilization,
You have to put the pieces together yourself.
Every day.
If the steeple leans, don't blame the wind.
Hey, getting your hands dirty isn't the only part.
Afterward, there's singing.
Gregg Glory
10/16/2008
The Falcon Waiting
Spent the last four days in the company of poets at the Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival. A falcon showed up unexpectedly behind the huddled porta-johns in the misty weather. Somehow, I feel like like I'm always shaking Jim Haba's hand.
My friend Dan's a ghost now since Christmas.
In this mist
There's only a green line of fence
Last night's rain did not dissolve.
Then the falcon is there,
Snowy in the humid morning warmth.
He lets his silken shoulders shake.
His compact head moves like a ball
Rolling in your palm.
His face is all severe eye,
And one closed hook.
When he stares my way, I can't guess what he sees.
There is no time in him,
Only flight that has not yet risen to his wingtips.
When he goes from the wet fence
To the barn's peak,
Its like watching an old man shuffle
All his belongings in one gunny sack.
Looking back in paler air, I have
No memory of what we carry with us.
No weight keeps me on the ground.
There's almost nobody here.
Gregg Glory
09/29/2008
