The Ugly (Excerpt)
I love you as I love the Hatchetfish,
the Allmouth, the Angler,
the Sawbelly and Wolf-eel,
the Stoplight Loosejaw, the Fangtooth;
all our sweet bathypelagic ones,
and especially those too terrible or sly
even for Latin names; who saddle
their menfolk to the vagina’s hide'
[....]
Grain (Excerpt)
What was his name again – that fisher lad
dragged under with his fankled nets –
that one the fishes hooked and filleted?
I often wonder if the irony of it all consoled him somewhat
as he left off from kicking against the dark, and drowned:
not (as his mother always feared) to be lost at sea, but found.
Tell me you’ve never seen a hangman hung;
nor laughed at the dying tenor, topped by his own song;
nor stumbled across a baker’s corpse, rising like dough;
nor wept with the weeping ferryman while Charon
gummed his coin. Friends, we’re all done for by the things we do.
If I were a farmer now, I’d shrink from the ripening grain.
Landscape with Flying Man (Excerpt)
I read about him that was given wings.
His father fixed those wings to carry him away.
They carried him halfway home, and then he fell.
And he fell not because he flew
but because he loved it so. You see
it's neither pride, nor gravity but love
[....]
-John Glenday
