Glaze - Overheard in a drugstore: and other poems

Overheard in a Drugstore And Other Poems Andrew Glaze N EW S OUTH B OOKS Montgomery Also by Andrew Glaze Andrew Glaze: Greatest Hits 19642004 (2005) Remembering Thunder (2002) Someone Will Go On Owing: Selected Poems, 19661992 (1998) Reality Street (1991) Earth That Sings: On the Poetry of Andrew Glaze (1985) A City (1982) I Am the Jefferson County Courthouse and Other Poems (1981) The Trash Dragon of Shensi (1978) A Masque of Surgery: Poems and Translations (1974) Damned Ugly Children (1966) Lines/Poems:
Poems by Andrew Glaze & Engravings by Umaa (1964) The Token, a Selection of Verse (1963) NewSouth Books 105 S. Court Street Montgomery, AL 36104 Copyright 2015 by Andrew Glaze. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama. ISBN: 978-1-60306-399-9 eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-400-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015946966 Visit www.newsouthbooks.com Acknowledgments: Some of the poems in this volume were originally published in the following: Andrew Glaze: Greatest Hits 19642004 , Alleluia; Big City Lit , Fishermen, Bears; Birmingham Arts Journal , Issa, Hard Times, Trap of Feathers; Birmingham Poetry Review , Trees; Birmingham Weekly , Youre Never With Who You Want to Be; Boston /96, Garcia (re-titled Garcias Store); HYN Anthology & New York Muse Tomorrow Ill Be Gone; Light, Youre Never with Who You Want to Be; New York Quarterly , Witches, Nursing Home (retitled The Banderlog), Groucho; Negative Capability, If Suffering Is to Love; Pivot , The View From Straws, Epic, Seamstress (retitled Seamstress of Shine); Poetry Magazine , Antigua (re-titled A Visit to Barbados); Spirituality & Health , Alleluia; Sulfur City Review , Piata, Goddam Pretty, Blue Ridge,; Trails & Timberline Quarterly , A Place That Cant Be Bought (retitled Rudderless); TriQuarterly76 , Nursing Home (retitled The Banderlog); Turtlehouse Press , Overheard in a Drugstore, Mr. Frost.

To my children, Betsy and Peter, and their children and spouses Charles and Kate, and to Arlen and Bill with thanks. Contents I II III IV V Faculty and Fellows, 1946 Bread Loaf Writers Conference Rear: Robert Frost, Robert Bordner, Graeme Lorimer, Andrew Glaze, Wallace Stegner, Rudolph Kieve, Theodore Morrison, Eugene Burdick, William Sloane. Front: Carol Warren Burdick, Kay Morrison, Helen Everitt, Mary Stegner. (Used by permission of Middlebury College Special Collections and Archives) While at Harvard, Andrew Glaze met Robert Frost through a series of poetry student dinners and again at the 1946 Bread Loaf Writers Conference. In the mid-1950s, on a poetry tour, Frost had his Birmingham host contact Glaze to invite him on an excursion to Jasper, Alabama. In 2010, Glaze learned of the existence of Frosts 1956 note (opposite), which had been donated to Dartmouth by the wife of Glazes Harvard poetry teacher, Theodore Morrison.

One must assume it was part of a private exchange between Morrison and Robert Frost discussing poems that made their way into Glazes first published book. I should be sorry if a book of verse as genuine and readable as this couldnt find a publisher. I have high hopes of Mr. Glaze. Robert Frost, April 14, 1956. (By permission of the Robert Frost Estate; photo courtesy of the Rauner Library at Dartmouth) I Mr.

Frost An undocumented biographical note Mister Frost, like most champions of the prize, was a large person, towering over the miniscule poets skittering about the local minstrelsy. One day, a gaggle of them, worked out a magisterial moment for him to meet an ancient rebel confederate; it was said, alive on this earth a hundred and seven years. They wished to scrabble up the usual TV detritus about a New England bard discussing the unlikelihood that there was a still extant rebel miner, out in the dumps and pea patches of the Appalachian crags. But when they got there, they found it was only an old black man of a hundred and seven years who lived in a wooden piano box on half an acre of ravine covered in pine slash, out Jasper way. He raised a dozen chickens, had a hacking cough, and the two of them got talking what it meant to be old. Frost. Frost.

Else your bones will freeze, agreed the old man. How do you eat? said Mr. Frost. Oh, that aint so hard, the centenarian replied. I use my welfare to buy me chicken feed, and I has an egg for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It wouldnt be so bad if it wasnt for my lungs, they awfully full of itchy dust from the mines.

It seems like nothing but whisky will cut the dust. Mr. Frost ruminated a moment, then held up his hand as if someone had started to speak. The principle is, he said, that I think we should leave this gentleman alone. Hes got his life pretty well licked into shape, and as a pledge of concern and farewell, Ill buy him a bottle of whisky, said Mr. Frost.

Love Sometime, along the way, though love poems may flap and squawk, then escape, along in years, with luck, the ghost of one, somehow may come skittering back. Liquid as mist, its phantom will rise, the stinks youve remembered as bitter will be dried and perfumed like wild grass. Long-forgotten names and places will ache to come spilling out and the hosts of oblivion once more will speak. Old songs will mutter themselves into life remembering dreams, and when that time awakens, youll come to swear to yourself that something has shifted weight at the earths center. While the harmony lasts, what you dream you will seem to touch, what evanesces will seem to endure forever. Though it takes life for only a moment or so, as it awakes from its wraithy home youll once more shudder and sing, and out of its ghostly enchanted world, remember the miracle of speech.

Blue Ridge a lament. Its the best road between truckways climbing into miles, and here come Buckthorn, Hemlock, Mountain Laurel, Rhododendron, shotgunning everywhere, into light and dark, our motors let-up punctuated with Red-eyed Vireos, Summer Tanagers, Warblers, the occasional ghost of a Raven. Far below, tractors grumble, pickups scurry, and blue smoke rises from verandahed motels, hot instant chicken, bible colleges, refineries, and suburbs. At the other verge, eerily coming off the blind side uphill, flow boundless forests, and endless divisions of blue-gray butternut armies. Racketing with fierce crashes of musketry, they clatter behind risings, dashing across bare hills in patterns of horses. Tiny caissons crawl, shuddering past, bent with piles of the bloody wounded and dead, creaking to the bullet-shattered gossamer whinings of fife.

Its a vision of the kingdom we come from, the republic we have been setting out for. Two ghostly realms divided by a mystic ridge, running along between two terrible fates, like a double brink. What does it want from us? Pointless to weep, pointless to blame. The vision clears, rises like wood smoke, and does not disband. And still its there, awaiting, as we enter the machine again, and move off through leaf-doors and walls of shadow play. Climbing the Sky for Irene Latham Leaving from Cauterets, up to the South, after the first traverse we left the takers of the waters like trader ants below.

Ascending the causeway, dangling cups like aluminum chains, up the crystal skies we passed the toffee-folding machines, up through the bushy slopes leaving below the running waiters and steaming chicory blenders retreating behind us and beneath. Up the thunder-reverberating bowl of the pic de luz, the whole world behind was shrinking, like a cupboard tucked in a fringe of grass, then bent beneath and fell away, and we were in another world of long green slopes, world-weary yellow fields that fibrillated in the smoke of the August tingling air. Far away to north, the blunt hills were reduced by space into rhythmic demi-bubbles of France. The sun buzzed from the South, great too, in its own right, and north and south the feral sisters tramped away one next to another like great brown bears of the Pyrenees. We walked the tightrope of a col, and there we were, arrived at lastin the pockets of vastness anchored to the earth only by air. Joyous Overhead the sun bursts its bonds, a cloud buries its foolish face in nothing, and something hurries off to connive at day.