Michael S. Glaser

Once upon a time when there was only cottages and airplanes and mud puddles and buildings three- stories- tall, Michael Glaser came to St Mary's County. At that college he built an oasis for poetry and for more than 40 years brought in visiting poets from all over the world. He is the best teacher in the world and he let me share teaching with him each year, in May, since 1978. His poetry festivals brought together the Pulitzer and the fledgling... the great wellsprings of poetic thought. It was a blast of light. - Grace Cavalieri

Michael S. Glaser served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2004 – 2009. He is a Professor Emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where he taught for nearly 40 years. He is a recipient of the Homer Dodge Endowed Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Columbia Merit Award for service to poetry, and Loyola College’s Andrew White Medal for his dedication to the intellectual and scholarly life in Maryland, and for his commitment to sustaining the poetic tradition in the State of Maryland. Currently, He serves on the Board of Directors of the Maryland Humanities Council and on the Maryland State Department of Education’s Arts Advisory Committee.

Glaser has edited three anthologies, including Come Celebrate with Me, a memorial tribute to Lucille Clifton (2011), and has published eight collections of his own work, most recently “Disrupting Consensus” which won the 2008 Teacher’s Voice chapbook competition, and “The Threat of Rain” (2014). He served as co-editor of the Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2012), writes poetry reviews for The Friends Journal and co-leads retreats which embrace the reading and writing of poetry as a means of self-reflection and personal growth. (more at www.michaelsglaser.com)

Studies of Dawn

Ruskin urged his students to think of their drawing exercises

as both a scientific record and as an act of worship

which had nothing to do with picture making.

(sign on an exhibit)

Ruskin urged his students to think of their drawing exercises

as both a scientific record and as an act of worship

which had nothing to do with picture making.

(sign on an exhibit)

And Ruskin too, every day, painted the sacred shape –

the grace of a gladiola or the subtle Rose of Demeter,

its pulse mingling emerald and ruby as it played in the light.

Amazing, this language of the heart,

these brushstrokes in which the edge

of a boar’s hair bristle

bends the stem of a paper narcissus

into the head of a heron

or a flat, broad sweep leaves behind

a dogwood petal

looking like nothing so much

as the ancient beard of God.

III

I hold these images faithfully,

try to understand the delicate caress

of such worship,

how hand and brush and color discover

the florescent flash, celebrate the ineffable

on blue-gray paper,

the awe of this sunrise or that storm,

the blessing of a long stemmed iris,

the delicate jointing of an olive branch.

How brilliantly the colors body forth,

as though they spoke in the multi-lingual

tongue of the Holy Ghost,

breathing black to blue to orange to white:

a paradise itself, bathed and borne

anew in this subtle and shining light.

Paradox

“What artist would ever have painted a season of dying

with such a vivid palette if nature had not done it first?”

…Parker Palmer

If I could embrace my own late years

as the oak embraces the dying of the light,

flaming orange and red and yellow,

lingering green, glowing bright…

If I could embrace staying in place,

like the oak,

and letting go, gently,

of what no longer serves,

what great understandings might I then

come to know,

what new green might begin to grow?

Cancer

On my way to work, the King Singers on the radio.

Their close harmonies soar -- and I try to absorb

the sweetness of it,

to calm the errant growth, blooming inside.

On the cornfield to my left,

hundreds of migrating geese peck at the earth,

glean sustenance for their journey.

I envy their instinct, their innocence.

In a year how many of us will still be alive?

To my right the carcass of a deer

lies in the soybean field.

Plucked at by buzzards for over a week,

its cavity is now exposed --

and I marvel at the logic of it all:

this giving of what remains to sustain the living

and the strange gratitude I feel

for this moment

with the King Singers, the migrating geese,

my cancer and the body of that deer --

the vibrant offering of this singular, sunlit day.

The Grandchild of Love

Look deeply into her eyes.

See the old soul there,

simple and wise.

She asks for little:

some attention, a book to read,

pictures to point at, someone to listen.

She is embraced by joy.

She embraces joy.

Nurture this.

Nurture this.

The rest

you’d best not meddle with.

Gathered at the Table

“We need to be brave enough to invite our contradictions

to the same party as our commitments.”

Here at this table

where intuition sits proudly beside logic

and scientific analysis has loosened its grip

on rigid exclusivity

here, where excitement of the unknown replaces fear,

as if at a dinner party, where we know that whatever is served

will warm its way into a paradigm that prefers

questions to explore more than answers that presume,

here where the mathematics of ideas

does not deny the interior of our lives,

here, at this table, we toast each other --

what is and what might be.