On the whole I really like poetry, but there are few poems that stick with me, that list inside my head, adding gravity by their attachment to a single spot inside my skull, just above my right ear. There are even fewer poems that become seeds that sprout (usually slowly and always painfully) in the cranial recesses.  Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” is one (it’s putting out another leaf right now and it is most uncomfortable).

Two slim books of poetry arrived for me today. Both are by Michele Glazer. I feel as if I may have met another.

This poem is from Aggregate of disturbances.

Moon Casings

The full moon is not beautiful
and the headaches when her head
was bent that way
proved matter less stable than we thought.
The full moon that could tell —
could swell with meaning — until the order of words
failed in her.

                There's how it got there —
how it got to gather mass and be intruder
who might occlude cognition. Balance
would fail her. The full moon tells a story,
a chronology of movement
toward the center and out again.
The children — who have no name
for it — draw pictures —

              Moon upon moon — we are drawn
into the dense and glowing center, cast
there at the white shore of cells,
the location of where she is where
there is no backwards and no
future and the nurses were kind
to warn her when it was slivered out
she would hear inside her head the sound of it
assuming the very shape of
things at the edge throw the edge
into dispute and suggest something beyond
the full moon is not beautiful and the rind —
slim moon — the surgeon left
might not possess that critical
mass it needs to rise
again — he says — leaving
all things aside —