Diane Glancy is a professor at Azusa Pacific University. Her latest poetry collections, STORIES OF THE DRIVEN WORLD and IT WAS THEN, were published in 2010 and 2012 by Mammoth Press in Lawrence, Kansas. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in poetry.
Father,
My Father
I had to ask and maybe ask again,
but he bought the wool skirt and sweater I wanted.
How often memories are a bath of acid
in which old photographs sat.
My father was a silent man.
His work was his constancy—
his solid footing in the house.
He left and returned each day
with talk of union workers vying for their lives—
who would have power and who wouldn’t.
It always got back to that—
the same old song of the world.
I knew the sound of cattle in the stockyards—
the move of their hooves up the wooden ramp
where sparrows sang from the rafters
above the kill floor.
It was as if cattle were given language
in their last cries, telling their stories of the field,
the long discomfort of the travel,
the railroad wheels clicking clicking their way to death.
They didn’t want to give something,
but they did.
It Was Then
…these are the mere edges of His ways—
Job 26:14
From the window, the windbreaks and furrows argued.
I was not afraid by then, but held onto the swift turns—
these roads— hard evidences of the shifting earth.
I wanted to feel these words as paintings the way I felt
when I danced but there was no one to dance with
the way I wanted to dance but stopped at every turn.
I kept inventing new roads between the wales of corduroy
or were they rows of fields I traveled?— All the distances
to get away from— it was then as now— mere edges to cross.
This earth sits on a plate over which God holds his knife
and fork— or was it pruning fork?— A glob of a God, wondrous, large, expanding outward.
I had to ask and maybe ask again,
but he bought the wool skirt and sweater I wanted.
How often memories are a bath of acid
in which old photographs sat.
My father was a silent man.
His work was his constancy—
his solid footing in the house.
He left and returned each day
with talk of union workers vying for their lives—
who would have power and who wouldn’t.
It always got back to that—
the same old song of the world.
I knew the sound of cattle in the stockyards—
the move of their hooves up the wooden ramp
where sparrows sang from the rafters
above the kill floor.
It was as if cattle were given language
in their last cries, telling their stories of the field,
the long discomfort of the travel,
the railroad wheels clicking clicking their way to death.
They didn’t want to give something,
but they did.
It Was Then
…these are the mere edges of His ways—
Job 26:14
From the window, the windbreaks and furrows argued.
I was not afraid by then, but held onto the swift turns—
these roads— hard evidences of the shifting earth.
I wanted to feel these words as paintings the way I felt
when I danced but there was no one to dance with
the way I wanted to dance but stopped at every turn.
I kept inventing new roads between the wales of corduroy
or were they rows of fields I traveled?— All the distances
to get away from— it was then as now— mere edges to cross.
This earth sits on a plate over which God holds his knife
and fork— or was it pruning fork?— A glob of a God, wondrous, large, expanding outward.
© 2013
Diane Glancy
Diane Glancy was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the February 2013 Second Sunday Poetry Series
Diane Glancy was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the February 2013 Second Sunday Poetry Series