FOUR POEMS BY LAURA GLENN
Autumn Bus Ride
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Leafy trees color leafless ones.
A man rakes a cloud.
Images from the left window
reflect on the window to my right:
Old houses float across lawns
to root in trees.
An elderly couple walks through a field,
then through hills and sky.
A horse flies over a silo.
Cars glide on a large pond—tailed by a fume of starlings.
A bicyclist wheels through a rippling stone wall.
A submerged house drifts: some windows open.
Yellow evergreens scrub into a tunnel.
Where are we going?
The sky turns brick.
A man walks his dog through it.
New storefronts slide over old-fashioned ones.
A man and a woman stride through each other, take no notice.
An extra lane of cars drives the wrong way.
Wildflowers dot the grass: car and traffic lights.
Extraordinary: The ordinary meets the ordinary.
Tracks railroad up houses like ladders,
a cat curled on one rung—rescued!
Clouds are lost in clouds.
Fields add green to green: greenest
where both sides meet.
The grass changes its hue.
Imperiled by illusions,
a woman steps over a verdant cliff
into the blue.
What could she be thinking?
Ah: The road lofts up beneath her.
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​
Juggled
​
Just when I find that still space
in the center,
you can hear a pin crash!
Lately, I’ve been feeling like pins
whirling through the air.
Up we go again.
Who’s the juggler?
Why are sparklers added?
A shower of fiery angels
spark from heads of pins,
circle like fireworks
in daylight.
More pins drop.
Douse the burning grass
in a shower of water.
Please, do not add knives . . .
So many selves flying flaming
—faster, faster—
spinning till they disappear,
as if I didn’t know
what’s coming:
extinguish me anew.
Sometimes a force almost
beyond me helps to pick me
up in the air again;
sometimes, for a long moment,
everything stays there.
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​
Elegy for the Luminous
​
After centuries,
pink roses remain dewy—a few weighed down
by headiness. You’d like to inhale the golden-orange freesias: not a scent
of turpentine. Crocuses open beaklike, snowdrops droop,
colors swirl up Rembrandt tulips,
persimmon lilies arc
backward in the vase aswarm with flowers
of every season—combinations
no gardener ever saw.
In your garden one loveliness replaces another.
Sometimes shoots drown in their roots in an eyesore
patch of earth you can’t paint over.
Winter gessoes your canvas white.
You sketch on it with a stick
and dream of seeds—their hidden pigment. Eternally pink
petals collect at the bottom
of this Dutch Still Life,
where grape hyacinths spike up, and higher—star delphiniums.
Poised leaflike on a stem, the subtle butterfly’s beyond delirium.
Despite the museum window’s darkening landscape,
despite the pithy insights on the painting’s placard,
you don’t notice—farther down the wall—
the framed timepiece, mirror, skull,
but admire the lushness of the peony,
the creamy yellow strokes of composite,
the unblinking delft verbena.
The lizard
lolling in the shadow, deepened by age,
takes in the viewer who, forgetting the reaper, gleans
the moment, and wanting all bounty, all seasons
at once, loses sight
of the heavy frame.
​
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Depth Perception
​
Last year,
walking this path,
wind blew through a pine tree—
for an instant I saw the ghost of the tree
made entirely of pollen, and shaped like a pine,
float through the air.
Something about this evening light:
distant streetlights cast long reflections
across the lake—shrouded, amber-tinted,
and shaped like upright bodies
bandaged by the light
like mummies,
though I also think: Ganges.
“It’s the dead,” I say
and start to cry.
“Father,” I whisper.
I start to connect
to one of the reflections
—they’re like cocoons—
as if something might emerge,
and my father and I might continue
things said and left unsaid,
heard and not heard.
Down the lake
of time, the reflections appear
in sequence—staggered—and stagnant
for the moment, like the gone.
My father loved travel—
India, Egypt, everywhere.
Where are you going now,
brave voyager?
As solid looking as the lamp lights’ reflections,
reflections of car lights
move fast,
as if there’s no one here
they need to stop and see.
I head home on my walk,
treading soft needles to humus.
My father, with his gift
for making something
of life, now is light on water: illumined;
swaddled, like a mummy,
about to start a new life . . .
and some part of me can’t stop entertaining
thoughts I don’t believe in.
​
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Acknowledgment
“Autumn Bus Ride” appeared in Literal Latté and in I Can’t Say I’m Lost; “Juggled” appeared in When the Ice Melts; “Elegy for the Luminous” appeared in Like a Fragile Index of the World and I Can’t Say I’m Lost; and “Depth Perception” appeared in From the Finger Lakes: A Poetry Anthology, Healing Muse, and in When the Ice Melts.