#john glenday

[majestativa]

How can I write about her? She could charm angels and devils.

GHAREEB ISKANDER (غريب إسكندر) — Gilgamesh’s Snake and Other Poems, transl. by John Glenday & Ghareeb Iskander, (2004)

[undinesea]

What is love if it is not an unravelling against the dark?

John Glenday, "Windfall," from The Golden Mean

[contremineur]

[...] then tell me you too imagined it this way with our shadows never quite touching the river and the river never quite reaching the sea.

John Glenday, final lines to The river

from here

[wildlyconstant]

We raise you towards the dark. May you make of it something else.

John Glenday, closing lines from ‘Lucie’

[whisperthatruns]

Portage

We carry the dead in our hands. There is no other way. The dead are not carried in our memories. They died in another age, long before this moment. We shape them from the wounds they left on the inanimate, ourselves, as falling water will turn stone into a bowl. There is no room in our hearts for the dead, though we often imagine that there is, or wish it to be so, to preserve them in our warmth, our sweet darkness, where their fists might beat at the soft contours of our love. And though we might like to think that they would call out to us, they could never do so, being there. They would never dare to speak, lest their mouths, our names, fill quietly with blood. We carry the dead in our hands as we might carry water---with a careful, reverential tread. There is no other way. How easily, how easily their faces spill.

John Glenday (text found here)

[elizabethanism]

John Glenday:

[a-ramblinrose]

I know we’re living through all the dark we can afford. Thank goodness, then, for this moment’s light and you, holding the night at bay – a hint of frown, those focused hands, that open book. I'll match your inward quiet, breath for breath. What else do we have but words and their absences to bind and unfasten the knotwork of the heart; to remind us how mutual and alone we are, how tiny and significant? Whatever it is you are reading now my love, read on. Our lives depend on it.

John Glenday, “For My Wife, Reading in Bed”

[catilinas]

John Glenday, Undark