When I Was a Glacier by Emily Skillings

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend October 11, 2016   When I Was a Glacier   Emily Skillings

That Bruegel painting of hunters returning in winter, the filmmakers go nuts for it. A sad rabbit on a stick & more. It’s like really in there, tonally— a male, disappointed group trudge towards a more lighthearted communal flurry, women and children full of fire upholding weird roofs doing the real work.   A moment ago I moved something (not particularly large) to the other side of the table and felt so old and immense and in control. Like a truck crunching on its path. I project white onto the floorboards. And isn’t this music from that ballet that always makes us? Indistinguishable from a folktale-pink shock   of pure quartz through the wall. Give me one irregular mark for my thigh to pit the year against. 16th century sound gets all over the daybed and you relocate your teeth to the opposite nipple. My thought in that moment it’s a brutal cave. Brightest bird, tailfeather, increasing gray line, fail me my distant mountain.            Copyright © 2016 Emily Skillings. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I’ve always loved Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow and noticed that many filmmakers have used it in their films: Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, etc. I’m attracted to the way it shows different planes of experience in somewhat varying emotional registers existing simultaneously in one space. There’s the foreground of the discouraged hunters, the kinetic community of ice skaters, and this kind of unfathomable, green-gray distance containing what is perhaps my favorite bird in all of painting. I wanted to use the dynamics of the artwork as a starting off point (and perhaps a visual anchor) for a poem that jump-cuts between mediums, sensations, and feelings of purpose or purposelessness. I think it’s an ‘indoors poem’ that wants to be an ‘outdoors poem.’ The title is a misheard Nicki Minaj lyric. In her 2010 song ‘Your Love,’ she says, ‘When I was a geisha he was a samurai.’ I thought for months she was saying ‘glacier’ and was disappointed when someone corrected me. I liked the ideas of glaciers and samurais being connected, which of course they are.” —Emily Skillings   Emily Skillings is the author of Fort Not (The Song Cave, forthcoming in 2017). She is a teaching fellow at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.   Photo credit: Gregory Scheidler "The Wall Hanging I Never Noticed" by Dorothea Lasky "We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d" by Walt Whitman "Watch the Film You Paid to See" by Todd Colby Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038