Glenn Ingersoll
Ways Out of the Great Maze of the Celestial Mouth
after Jack Martin
It is immaterial as the wind entered into evidence.
Cupped in a second hand is all the time you're invited to take,
"And vast it is... " says mother mildly.
"You have no idea how long she slaved to get from 5 to 9," Dad said.
"I am on the lips of every cow," continues the grass wistfully,
"and you will be, too, after I've done my work."
There is time for dew and the root causes of dew,
and there is placement assistance for the cadres of dew.
There will be distance set aside for distance, if necessary.
"Am I the one who's killing time or is it you?"
She looks at her hands. "Washed lingerie flapping out the third floor window
where the killing's done; yourself by yourself deprived of time."
"For thousands of millenia," he pointed out, "time has been wounded by potshots.
Go ahead. Make your little jokes, see what harm they cause.
No one understands how the clocks hide these hurts."
Imagine yourself beside yourself sleeping, the dreadful snoring keeping you awake.
What could be more leathery than the cow's bald ass?
Or than position papers thoughtfully executed?
I have only envy for the sundial's garden and eyes
for the Crickets, ears for the Platters, skin for the lacy underthings.
Day wears her victims' various pelts lazily stitched.
On her wrist the wispy cheek of the boy from Calculus who met his end in a sunlit grove.
"Look at the daisies," said the girl before she found the body.
"It is the reason she never touched you," said a note in his back pocket.
"I don't know how to explain agony except as God's wish
to seize back that notion you had eternity on your side."
Glenn Ingersoll lives in Berkeley, having moved there in 1991 to finish his undergraduate studies at the University of California. While at Cal he studied poetry with Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian and John Ash. Ingersoll's work has been published in Exquisite Corpse, Prairie Schooner, Phoebe, and Columbia Poetry Review, among other places. In 1993 his poem "Winged Man" won the Charles B. Wood Memorial Award from the Carolina Quarterly. Spring of 1999 saw the publication of City Walks (Broken Boulder Press).
His own site is here.
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