That Would Be Whidbey

Would that be Whidbey over there?
Stare down at the water long enough
& the boat moves backwards.
                                               Would there be
birds on a ferry?

There would be words,

yours?

This boat is not for sitting or sunning.
It is not for us to turn & dock anywhere.
I came for something.
Automobiles line up like the points
in the argument while all the time
were you thinking of pleasure?
Turn your engine off,

                               cormorant,
and that would be Whidbey.

Whidbey, if there are crows at the river.
Whidbey, where there are stumps.
There is only one way to get there:
departure.
                    But the river now
is jumpy in our wake,

                                             & loneliness attends me
like the printed dress that keeps turning up one summer
on different women, (different colored hair).

This is a poem from Glazer’s On Tact, & the Made Up World. There’ll be another one at the end of this post, and both have been chosen because of what she does with space. I’ve reproduced the spacing as accurately as possible so notice how the lines are widely separated and the way in which some of the lines start far to the right, as if they have leapt ahead of themselves—or as if there was a long, silent pause between breaths / the lungs held still until that moment just before they start to ache.

Spacing, here, also works to allow the “ocean” to surface between elements of the poem. I don’t really want to use the word “stanza” since it seems more as if the groups of words act as islands, each with its own character and each implying submerged text in the white space.

The only thing I’m not happy with is the font she (?) chose. Like most books of poetry, it is the same, apart from the use of italics and small caps.  I would like to see what a carefully chosen triplet (or pair) of fonts would do. I am curious to know whether it would further peel back the skin of the eye to allow the world to erupt through the jangled/knotted relationship between styles. I am going to play with it on my own and see; I am sure that too much “jangle” would disrupt from the tenuous serenity achieved in the poems, but I suspect careful attention to each “island’s” character by way of its typographical texture/image might act like a shot of caffeine on a morning brain.

Also by Michelle Glazer ↓

Not where you found me but where you looked,

out of the switch grass
blood rushes
up

           ———flushed

Bird you say, (the mark on its tail)

Bird, and not where the mind suffers
its margins of attention,

here     I am                                      all but

(slim line of white,
                                            a mark on its tail)

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 —