Poetry of Kathleen Glasgow, Prose Poems

Poem

I have a confession to make. Four days ago, a dusk just like this, tawny and still, four hundred million years old and counting: I knew how I would die. The doctors would come and fall into my mouth carrying white roses. Windows would turn to paper and each brown bird of the world would build a nest. Rain would lurch into each desolate crack of each desolate house in each desolate city I had lived and wash all of you, and me, clean, clean. The nurses would come to rub us up for the burial and the songs. Airplanes would shatter the noon sky of winter, summer, spring. Mail would shiver into the wrong slots. People would tear the envelopes and watch as their mouths shimmied away into musical notes. The cats would be smart, though. They would know that now was a time to begin again and they would walk, knowing they might have to walk forever, in order to find people smarter than us. And then you and I would go under, listening as the crying rose, as the trees had no comment, as the finches looked away, as someone coughed, coughed again, and left. Then we would have the slide. After the people and the cats had gone. That fine and purposeful drag. That dark stone covering us, deliberate as any mortal music.

Walls

Sometimes they sing at night not shabby like the blues or heart- romping like Ellington or even long and tight and quiet like the great lost Eubie Blake It’s more like the meadow of a thirties piano Eroll Garner maybe blowing on the keys to begin and then the keys toss up their hot heads beneath his fingers urging the sound out out out out until his fingers bleed with all the bucking, all the pain of living, beauty, misunderstanding, and the pines outside the window shush up in respect fear gather neat skirts greened begin to keen, sway oh how ladies can sway oh how everything is now a sort of melancholic soul-ache now that you are older have returned to this house this white-sheeted, clean narrow bed window illuminating the stiffness of your limbs white knuckles jambed toes anticipating some declaration of danger in a foot step on stairs that never comes oh the body is so much more than this: bones, flesh, beating fist in the chest, flashes of flashes of flashes inside the walls relax for you tuning up for the trees tuning up your ribs, tuning up songs that won’t die won’t ever die, as you will songs living in the bone of the house wheeling up from the basement long the rafters crafty snake blue and blue the singer’s fingers tamping the keys head arched smart glint of sweat on his forehead /oh lordy/ /oh lordy/ oh your daddy done split you in two, split you in two, it’s the next day, what you gonna do, what you gonna do / oh lordy oh lordy/

Falling in the Dark

Another thing: when I was running in the desert, far from the lit road, I heard all sorts of things. Something like the gnash of teeth to my left, something like the ticking of owl feathers to my right. The picking apart of the world by its very own in the dark. If the stars loosened, the sky would tumble. Danger and beauty everywhere as I bled above my eye, stones from the fall in the wash still falling from my face. I pressed sand against the wound and loved the desert perfectly for trying to tamp the liquid inside of my body. The world seemed clean and perfect and absolute, so much happening all around me that had nothing to do with me: chirp, bleat, tug, whistle. I sat on the ground and laughed. Who was I to this world? Nothing. Just motion, another tinny heartbeat that soon slept and soon left.

Copyright 2007, Kathleen Glasgow. © This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.

Kathleen Glasgow received her MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her poetry has appeared in Cimarron Review, Bellingham Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and Roanoke Review.