For the Love of Certain Spaces
by Jane Ellen Glasser
The moon’s watermark
on a brightening sky,
highways that fall away
to the horizon, a dirt trail
beneath arched trees,
avenues lined in the airy
giants of Australian pines,
woodlands glazed in ice,
a roadside intoxicated
with poppies, wetlands
crowned with duckweed
and the yellow fists
of spadderdock, islands
tremulous with wings,
a shoreline’s give and take
over which a pelican
pulls a string of pelicans,
the fifty blues of the ocean,
a solitary cabin beside
a scribbling stream,
the black snake
of a mountain pass,
a cave’s musky breath,
dusk’s descending veils,
on an evening flight
from 3,000 feet
the fallen constellations
of city lights, pressing
down in the pure dark
of the countryside
the brilliant stars.
BIO: Jane Ellen Glasser’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, such as Hudson Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Georgia Review, Haydens Ferry Review and Poetry Northwest. Her poems have garnered numerous awards from the Irene Leache Society, Puddingstone, and the Poetry Society of Virginia, and she has been recognized for outstanding articles on teaching poetry that were featured in Virginia English Bulletin and English Journal. In the past she reviewed poetry books for the Virginian-Pilot, edited poetry for the Ghent Quarterly and Lady Jane’s Miscellany, and co-founded the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review. A first collection of her poetry, Naming the Darkness, with an introduction by W. D. Snodgrass, was issued by Road Publishers in 1991. She won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry 2005, and her award-winning book, Light Persists, published by Tampa University Press in April 2006, received an honorable mention in the 2007 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Her chapbook On the Corner of Yesterday, published in 2010, was followed by The Long Life, which won the Poetica Publishing Company Chapbook Contest 2011. Her latest collection The Red Coat appeared from FutureCycle Press in 2013.
Tags: Jane Ellen Glasser, Poetry