Early May by Brian Glaser

Every year the jacarandas begin to blossom

Right around the anniversary of my birth.




When my grandmother came to visit us in my boyhood

She walked past the cemetery and the freeway

To mass every morning at dawn.




My daughter told my wife and me,

“I know you don’t believe in God—

But I do.”




I cannot even join Pascal in his wager;

I am too in love with sincerity.




I have been in hell,

When I was delusional the last time,

Convinced that a glass of water my mother offered me

Was either poison or antidote.

I had a short time to choose.

I knew I was in hell.




Now I am sane again,

But even falling asleep the night before last

I believed in hell for a moment,

A dark, infinite space without love.




The unknown future, that waits for each of us—

The brief spring of the barren jacaranda,




The faith of my son running past them to school.
























Brian Glaser's poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Literary Imagination, Lascaux Review, Berkeley Poetry Review and a number of other journals.  He has also worked as a dramaturg for The Wooden Floor.