How We Happened
by Jane Ellen Glasser
You arrived like a letter forwarded to a wrong address,
like a dog’s nose to the ground seeking its way home,
like the last peach on a tree, or a stone skipped across
water to land safely in the palm of a leaf. You came
out of a seeming nowhere like a slow-developing sheet
of film; like a fledgling, fanning the air from the lip
of its nest; like the sun, at day’s end, content to bleed
into a purpled horizon. Like a bet decided on the flip
of a coin, Heads, you called. And I answered, the way
mourning doves volley songs through a stand of pines,
a bounced ball returns to a child’s hand, or a stray
shadows a boy’s heart to a door. Like a trumpet vine
to a hummingbird, I invited you in. Stay! I said,
Stay like a rock washed smooth by a river. And you did.
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