*** gregglory.com ***

Wordpress in the House

new features on an old, cobwebby website

Just added Wordpress to gregglory.com at gregglory.com/wordpress to share "Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God," mentioned below. I'm also spending some time adding older content into the Wordpress portion of the site. This makes it easier to read and share specific poems, and now allows evetyone to directly comment on content.

If I end up publishing your poetry, you'll have your own whole section of the newer website, and people can discuss your geni-i-ii-ius, and Wylie E. Coyote might say.

Gregg Glory

8/21/2011

The Abandoned Cottage

A Frost-like emanation of mixed emotion.

We had walked some way beyond the ways
We knew, where undeciphered trees half-sway
Grey upon an unfamiliar hill.
Out beyond scenic view and common rill
We came upon a household ruin--
An abandoned cottage litter-strewn,
Ensconced in wood and weed that noon
Dappled shafts of noon-beams through;
The shadow-teepee that slanted gables threw
Shone dark in undisturbed dews.
Rain-new porcelain glimmered through netted vines,
Dim among the blackened kitchen pine
And dirty plates laid out for four
Half-visible through a crooked door....
What had startled birds, and inverted nest
Where wildered briars now braid and twist?
Had the ratchet-grip of slow foreclosure
Or some more innocent departure
Shuttered a home once loud with life?
No one living who knows is left.
We paused--our picnic hamper
Swinging silent--to view a place that lamp
And laughter had long conspired to warm.
We exchanged a look as if warned.
Those who dwelt here must have wandered,--
By easy brook and tall hillside sauntered
Even as we ourselves, undaunted.
We held our hands a moment tighter
(As if we'd glimpsed Life's dark and light),
Then turned away from wood and cottage
To scenes of less somber wattage.

Gregg Glory

5/10/2012

Yard by Yard

a prose square from the upcoming "Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God," a Cali Travel Journal in the spirit of Basho

The park is filled with facts and figures. El Capitaine is so many yards, feet, and inches tall. There are so many species of bird, buck, and squirrel ransacking the foliage. How many and how shushing quiet are the various lean thin needles of the pines, oak-digger, yellow, sugar-pine, whose branches take to the sky with all the varying stratagems of sunbathers angling for the perfect tan. This year the volume of waterflow down Yosemite Falls is greater than the past fifty springs have seen. Whole generations of park tourists--and even expert guides and the denizens of wood and cliff--have not seen the strength of spray that greets my face this lucky year. Rainbows leap from domes of snow in rare display. This land of stone is softened by a film of wet, a woman's touch, a something that, however counted, however added up, remains measureless.

How shall I measure my time spent loving you, dear Earth? Is it the length and weight of my coffin? Expellations of breath per hour, the number of days enlivened by thee, or the number of days I will be denied? Sweat softens my brow as I manage another tricky, slidey slurrying step down the long walk from the Falls.

Gregg Glory

8/01/2011

Evil Interludes (Redux)

a short novel inspired by the life of Chas Baudelaire

I have spent an anoyingly, alarmingly long time on revising and fluffing this treacherous text. A few words of revisionary advice from Dan Weeks set me on a path to create the perfect "Artist's Bible." Chock-full of homilies and horrors, the stances tried out by this Charles Baudelaire range from the irenic to the ironic--and done at a galloper's pace. No punk, no slammer, is more up-to-date than this man dead 150 years. He invented the poete maudit that became the cliche of critics, rock-stars, and poets "too pure" to participate in the hoary haggle of the marketplace--of ideas, that is!