Two Poems by Glenna Holloway

Snow Light

 

Even in the north

we’re moved to announce, “It’s snowing!”

with a certain inflection, a hint of something

beyond the fact. No strangers to snow,

Viking born and furred to the teeth, we live

with it for months, intimate as lovers,

faithful as hooded high priests at old rituals.

Fragments of frozen water—no mystery in that.

Yet we stare transcendent, watching

its vagaries, versifying its forms.

Streaking horizontal across window

and horizon, how can there be any on the ground?

Dropping vertical and deliberate,

how can anything so heavy be so silent?

Some of us have begun to suspect. Snow is

the ghost of something. Not summer or youth

or things obvious. More likely the plasm

of what we don’t know, didn’t discover, failed

to follow when we glimpsed it sidewise. It flew

across the parallax for an instant, triggered

dormant sensors, discreetly hidden sweat glands.

We never learned its identity. So it keeps coming

back with a common alias. Beauty we recognize.

Cold that can kill. Frigid force able to crack

our bricks, crash our roofs, bury us.

Maybe there are answers in this wild whiteness,

before earth’s soil claims it, before deadness

defiles it. There is a presence here.

The sky is grave dark, storms whip and wheeze.

But look at the light. The snow light.

Chicago: First Lady of the Lake

 

She moved leanly through Indian twilight,

shabby and unmet, slogging through swamps,

trailing her long skirts through crow-black mud

and the evil smell of skunk cabbage.

She stumbled and fell on shores that bullied her

with dares and promises others never heard.

She lay on the flats in bosomy youth, gazing

blue-ward—high hollow blue, pale-seamed

with deep wet blue, cobalt and indigo

priming the canvas, waiting for a subject.

Waiting for her to quiet her urgent hunger,

waiting for her to find a winter-smith husband

and breed a breed taller and more stubborn

than blue emptiness.  Without first-glance beauty,

without dowry or lineage—a razorish termagant

on Tuesday, demure as dimity on Wednesday,

racy as red sequins on Saturday night

then Sunday-caring through the rains

gone white and heavy on her head—she was

an enigma—fine figure, unfathomable sum.

After her wedding, for better and worse, feast

and fire, splinter and gilding, she took

her time with the art of lady-hood, more earned

than learned, writing her own music while moving

miles of gritty rail cars, tons of bloody meat.

She roughed-in composition with charcoal,

handled palette and brushes her way,

toning the flattering, fuming, prodding blues

waiting for their match, icing and steaming,

waiting for her to model her rising brood

with the back of her hand.  She taught them

to pose substance on air and water,

add warm shades to the mix, close harmony

and rhythm to the minor key chords.  And at last

to put in perspective a million highlights

framing the watercolor palimpsest

accompanied by the newborn sound all her own,

and the light-stretched gamut of blues.

Glenna Holloway’s first and only book, Never Far from Water and Other Love Stories, was published in 2009 by Publish America. Her poems have been published in periodicals such as North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, The Formalist, The Georgia Review, Confrontation, Saturday Evening Post, The Lyric, Southern Poetry Review, Western Humanities and many others.

Holloway won many awards for her poetry, including the Pushcart Prize, the Milton Dorfman Award, the Heart Crane Memorial, the Illinois Art's Council Fellowship, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, the National League of American Pen Women Biennial, and many others. Holloway’s artistic endeavors include works of art in various mediums such as photography, silver and enamel jewelry, and paintings for which she also received many awards and accolades.

Glenna Holloway (February 7, 1928 - September 4, 2015)