Greg Glazner

The sunlight almost unfaceable, and weightless, and the gravities, wind-flickers, shadows, the ripped black places crows make on the phone poles— how to keep your own counsel, even against the little stabs, the winds and chromes— • Various flashes, the office door, a supper glass, a last smear of streetlight on the bedsheets. Nothing. On into the soaring, black release. • The messages say syllabus and vetting that and will be absent. Nothing. On into the what? the air you’re gliding on or falling from, the wind of it making ahs and salves in the hollow of your chest, Celina of a bodily sibilance like willows, of the shimmering, midsummer glance. You would allow yourself a message. How to make it low-key. How to keep it to a few lines. • On into the wind of whatever is happening. What leashes you seems to have come undone. You lean down into the white heap of black words. You pad out toward the water fountain into someone’s eyeshadowed look, the lush backwash of her skirt. You weigh maybe three or four ounces, swirling down the stairwell in whichever wind this is, your ribs aching with what they sing so shamelessly.

up a little,” he says, shutting the rusted tailgate, “maybe at least lean down from your high horse and look busy,” picking up his work gloves and his spade. “You’re not the only hick on the clock with an education,” he says, half- laughing, half-wheezing, and spits, his bottom lip bulging with a load of Skoal,“even if you do think pretty highly of your poetry.”

the froth of noise the undersides of the cedars make, the windblown dark that hints and fails for hours at effacement— maybe I could claim it isn’t praying, but it’s asking, at the least, begging that these lungfuls of this blackness eat whatever keeps on swelling and collapsing in my chest, and be done with it, no more noise left hanging in the spaces between brake lights than a smothered rush that sounds like suffering and is nothing. Instead a sobbing isn’t so much easing from my throat as shining like black light from my torso, veining the leaves of weeds, stoning the whole roadside in a halo—I can feel the heat of truck lights on my back, I’m inside that brilliant gravity, I think of time, I’m in the driver’s nightmare and it shudders by—

After Stevens By now the snow is easing the live nerves of the wire fence and the firs, softening the distances it falls through, laying down a rightness, as in the spackled whites, the woodgrains of a room’s hush before music, before a lush legato in whose unctions the excruciations ease, as in the first thick arrhythmics from the hardwoods of the late quartets, whose dense snow of emotion, downdrifting, formal, whose violins and cellos, desiring the exhilarations of changes, turn loose an infusion of wintry music, all sideslip and immense descent, repetitions, evolutions salving down into the still air, the wound, the listening.