A Trinity of Poems
Aporia
I am reading a book, Aporia, about the puzzlement. The contradiction of which would not be reached. But for the Lord of hosts. Who created the world from which to take his own. An awkwardness to be addressed— the eucharist from which the broken are whole. While people hide the crumbs. An aporia will be always a village in the way of the road. A decision point. To pave with words that don’t say it is said. There is one way to God’s heaven and that is in Christ. There is no other way going there. Though it may be proclaimed there is. Hell is the name of the place outside God. Its different rooms. As there are in heaven. I think I always have. Knowing my bones. In my crib. I had no one to cling. But the unseen who had no arms to pick up. No legs to walk to where I. But everywhere. I didn’t have to cry so long. Didn’t have to wail. It was given no one would come. But there was a thought that God was there as certain as the emptiness of the room. When parents were starting out with only the barest wall. They hardly knew the other. They would stay in the same house but were of different wood. Different pattern. Yet they were household goods. The strained-ness. Together though they would never be. It was in the church we went though not clearly. I understood. The world between. Christ had a hand that would profit. If I believed it there. I could skate as a follower. A believer of necessity and not choice. I am the emptiness that made me look to him. To know he offered the same. The rejected cornerstone. The aporia of faith. The not being to be. The man mowing next door. The book. The book. Be careful in the packing of the books. That one in particular. Of which he speaks. The tide. Which it will be.
The Quarterlog that Rolls Us
In the yard a man cuts his tree. Quarters the trunk. There is a village of water in the Gulf. The conquerors that came. Their smelling of sawmills. To acquire. To take. He built a quarter-log cabin. She made a log-cabin-pattern quilt. They had a log roll. It wasn’t billiards or slogans. But the spillage of bowling that held them. He left most of the trees unspoken. The logging trucks paved a road through the hills. The forests and the hills. Always a focal point. Of discussion. Of travels to places. I couldn’t keep apart. The unrelated specks of turf. It is for me. Here on this tiny island beside the giant sea.
A Kite.
The language of handle.
Take your ladder the gutter fallen off.
Traveling somewhere.
Light reflected on the plane of window.
Fuel to say.
Her dress of flannel a side-pocket of tin.
The log sliced we live by sections.
The divisions propel.
Diane Glancy was a mentor in the Carlow University MFA program from 2018-2022. She taught a cohort in experimental writing at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 2020 and 2024. Currently she lives in Texas without a cowboy or a horse. Her latest poetry collections are Piece, 2024, and The Cubist and the Lost Notebooks of the Painter’s Wife, 2025. A hybrid biography, Lazarus and the Intended Writings, is forthcoming in August 2026. She received the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature. “A Trinity of Poems” is from a new work, The Quarterlog that Rolls Us.