Poems by John Glowney
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A Map of Australia
by John Glowney
From Canary Summer 2023
John lives close to the shores of Lake Washington, a ribbon lake formed by the southern flow of the Puget lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet near the end of the Late Pleistocene, looking out at Mt. Rainier, an active stratovolcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc.
Hellish beauty--a map so crowded with fire
symbols they look like mushrooms
bunched along a tree root, or little geisha fans,
guitar picks, fish scales--red and yellow
clusters trimming a continent
with a ruffle of flame. A billion dead
animals littered over char, and abstracted
this way means I can’t actually see
the carcasses but they say they are
saving a few: arboreal koalas, evicted
from eucalypt woodlands, wallabies,
of the Macropodidae family,
as are the singed kangaroos, marsupials,
the big jacks
with their long limbs bound and taped
like a prize fighter’s hands.
I can’t bear to look at them, anyway,
the cattle lying down in the smoke,
the glossy black cockatoo,
the Wollemi pines, conifers really,
secret canyon of stragglers, Lazarus
taxa, diaspora of the Cretaceous,
the ashy small towns, the panic-
stricken mothers on the beach,
hurrying to snatch up the smallest
children, rushing into the surf,
into rowboats. They are all
so out of place, the shelters
collecting handmade
joey pouches, all these wild things,
in the arms of medics,
or volunteers,
or the cold, frantic sea.
© John Glowney
All Our Words for Melting
by John Glowney
From Canary Spring 2024
Once in the great big awful.
That’s how it goes on the ice
floe so thin you can’t. O dear
lover of pack ice, dear tusked
narwhal, O Steller’s sea cow,
heavy-boned, fat and slow.
Great Auk, ext. June 1844,
we’ve reunited your skin
with your internal organs.
O Arctic Tern, O Arctic Fox,
God rest. Each and every
Eskimo Curlew, God rest.
Untended grave of any sea
creature, bless. Passenger
pigeon, ectopistes migratorius
in our living dead language,
we’ll run a race in team t-shirts
hand-stitched by Mumbai
untouchables who work
for rusty tin cans, we’ll
keep the Garden of Eden
in a jar of formaldehyde.
The scientific term for
attendance on this planet
is weeping. In the spring
migrations, the reindeer calves
drown in the thawing rivers.
May our story begin
“In the little village of words
called Inuktitut lives Tuvaijuittuq,
the place where the ice never
melts.”
© John Glowney
Burning Down the House
by John Glowney
From Canary Summer 2023
our house-
plants, their daily seances
in our rooms, their hours
and hours of meditative
poses. They have feelings,
my daughter tells me, young enough
to know. School-children
retrofit fish tanks into terrariums
for caterpillars, pill-bugs,
a grass-hopper. Old growth forests
change themselves into shadows.
The children bring more twigs and leaves.
*
The butcher works his messy
knife, frees the heart,
liver, lungs, kidneys, the chuck, the shank,
rib, round, flank.
What cannot be eaten?
Duck soup, caviar,
chicken feet, gizzards. Haggis, sheep’s head.
Blood sausages, escargot, shark fin soup.
Rocky Mountain oysters. Calf brain, served
with tongue, sautéed with beurre noir
and capers—
*
The mansions of the Amazon are burning
Palm oil tears.
The mansions of the Amazon are burning
So much smoke
you can no longer see the jaguar, the gorilla,
the poison dart frog, hyacinth macaw,
golden-lion tamarind, the three-toed sloth.
The mansions of the Amazon are burning
The village roosters call out the names
of every dew-drop.
The mansions of the Amazon are burning
© John Glowney
Forest Fire’s Last Words
by John Glowney
From Canary Fall 2023
--a pine tree
scrawls smoke’s
delirious
epilogue
before fire’s pursuers,
exhausted chainsaws,
Pulaski’s in hand--
the full story
hard to pull out
of the charred acres
spark that ran to the river
spark high on old bark
spark that got lost in the willow grove
smolder of stump
shudder of ash
black and white
words
scorched air
the fleeing wolf
sniffs.
© John Glowney
Proof of Life
by John Glowney
Smutty prayers at the local bar by boys
who’ve lapsed into men, and night-time’s
a tiny chapel where they drink to what
they don’t feel, to unsolvable love,
the tab overloaded with middle age’s
unsettled scores, the late hour’s bitter
end: flop on the couch, flip on the tube,
the weekend’s bummed-out fade out.
*
Modernity’s apostles enter the past
without knocking, the inhabitants
as brain-washed as 1984,
every recyclable syllable staked
to history’s make-over, every old worry
out of warranty ---
the customer service rep reads his script
from slave ship manifests,
three-fifth’s men and women disembark in chains
at Charleston’s docks, cotton’s scars filigreed
inside their brains like a cattle brand.
We are the problem
for which there is no algorithm.
*
No need to apologize.
It’s bad, people.
It’s bad people.
Sackcloth and ashes for the sea-turtles.
Fleur du mal for the churches.
La mort for the tribes of snails.
Envy for the richest.
Debtor’s prison for the coal miner.
Sun tan lotion for the beaches of Antarctica.
Polar bear steaks for all.
*
Honesty is what we demand.
A tally
of the oceans’ droplets. Tail
the melted iceberg
to its final resting place. Play back
the security camera tape
of the rhino’s horn and the poacher’s
wild night.
*
A sliver of the oldest ice at the south pole
turns into a drop of water,
making a sound no one can bear to hear.
Civilization’s demise bright
as the star of Bethlehem, the elephant
hears the fatal horizon arriving
in shudders of dust, the dung beetle
out of touch with the north star.
The earth is one long ransom note.
We’ve arrived at the knife-
edge of birdsong, earthworm,
and honey-bee, the air littered
with the souls of extinct butterflies.
© John Glowney