Rooms and Their Airs
(Camere et Aer Ipsius)
Air out the quilt. Down remembers
the wind.
Remake the bed. Down remembers
its nest.
Open a window for northerly winds
that have swept across sweet water.
Open a window. Rain falling
on good land is good for melancholy.
Prepare a fish. If the skin’s not thick,
it lived in shallows that run among stones.
Eat fish with wine and raisins. Your thirst,
too, might be derived from grapes.
Conserve the bones. Nothing you do here
will be forgotten.
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“In cadences uncannily imbued with the exaltations, strivings, and hesitancies of human thought, Jody Gladding limns interior and exterior worlds like no other. Words atomize on the page; pacing itself becomes a radical and spiritual force, elemental as the trees, stones, landscapes, skies, which infuse these meticulously exploratory and wondrous poems. Gladding paints with great grace ‘the broken / surface where business / must go on’ and the inexplicable universe that contains it, the textures and intricacies of the human mind that strives to grasp while knowing it can only partly understand.”
—Laurie Sheck
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“Jody Gladding’s poems are original, beautiful, and fierce, sometimes enigmatic, but never gratuitously, only faithfully so. They bring to their world (our world) a unique mix of light, lightness, and depth: a world in which human feeling is not all the author’s concern—but more rare, like the human face in Bernifal.”
—Jean Valentine
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