Poetry: John Gallaher

The Glass Bridge Theory

Which is door, which is wall, as we say we want living to be absolute.

Which is fog in December and which is the same set of experiences at the same time?

The girl eats her sandwich.

You have made things yours, but those things have not accepted you as
belonging to them.

The little round-faced man drives his car, wanting living to be absolute.

The houses are soft, and folding over on each other.

The houses are off and never-endingly folding over each other.

When I was a kid, someone in my family used to buy lottery tickets.

Now I’m a round-faced man.

I eat everything, the ocean residing in fog, and the glass bridge approaching on many levels that don’t all arrive at the same time.

I’m very sleepy now.

The girl in the backseat is sleeping.

The boy and the woman are sleeping.

That’s all their names.

I change them every day.

Nearly Empty Room

We move about the yard freely, preparing questions for the plot.

We do it because we’re American and are trapped here and what else.

In the afternoon we hang money from the clothesline to dry, and we spend the evening placing it in our mattresses.

Here are the people we’ve assembled to talk about it, moving about the
evening freely.

They’re out back building a playground for the school, because none of us want to live forever, we say, as a way of avoiding death.

“But this is too surface,” they worry, and wonder if they should go back to the original conversation.

The room is full of the type of silence that comes just after a loud noise, as if to say experiences are better than things, which is also something already past.

Deep inside the house, then, is another house, with a nearly empty room.

We move about the yard freely, looking for windows, and wondering if we’ll be able to see the playground from here.

Later, we move about the playground freely, saying we’re done with thinking.

And I will go there too, across the topological and the holographic.

I will step out with sunglasses on.

“Hold my hand,” I’ll say, “I’m feeling unsteady.”

With the World Is Incidental Music

Sun in the midst, and a few rooftops in the foreground revealing the fall hills.

(I’m standing in the foyer stirring my coffee, which is a personal language, excuse me, in the evening when it cools down a bit, and van Gogh and Gauguin are trading gutturals in a yellow house.)

A bright blue jacket hangs upon the wall, which is likeable.

And drying oneself with a beach towel, green and green.

As we’re all leaving somewhere for somewhere, we were on a bridge over the pond.

We were running through the trees and the interplay of sunlight and shadow.

Perhaps I was overly anxious, and it was always almost summer then, or just after.

Spots of sun, divided yellow and blue, as when you’re reminded that people get sick and are suffering, or there’s some situation where you’re not able to help somebody.

Figure on the bank.

Figure in the water.

I used to remember all their names but now I don’t.

It wears you out.

The House from Which You Never Return

In the best of all possible worlds these things happen, living at once.

You will lie down on your back, defining the limits of earth.

The second half of the night is filled with houses that replace you.

It’s summer there, so the windows are open and the curtains are white, which we wouldn’t have known without visiting.

There is always something more to ask as in wanting children or wanting rain, or wanting new songs as good as the old songs.

Cars pass with a trail of sparks, illustrating the different ways in which people work.

You hear it and you keep hearing it.

You’ve crossed the yard and you’ve fallen.

My dream is to get to a place where whatever happens next while writing a poem happens next in the poem itself. I don’t know why I settled on that as important, but it’s gotten so important to me as to become something of a madness. I’ll probably be working on that a long time (the project and the madness), as I keep finding other things happening that I didn’t realize were happening. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of collage, appropriation, repurposing, and keeping a little notebook at all times in loud public places with the radio on.

John Gallaher is four months into his year of trying not to write poetry, with only limited success, though it does afford the time to work on audio things: soundcloud.com/jjgallaher. His next book is a non-fiction, memoir poem in 80 sections, titled In a Landscape (BOA 2015). Until then, he’s co-editor of The Laurel Review and The U of Akron Poetics Series.