Elton Glaser

Toast

It’s one of those mornings when you
Feel you were born
In some little horse-piss town in Texas.

And when you step into
The pup tent of your pants, into shoes
Like dogsleds in a tangled trace,

Rigged up wrong to face the day, well, by then
You’re sure there’s something
Absent from your life, like Hitler’s testicle,

And we all know what knives and ashes
Flashed from that angry arrogance,
That lopsided brain.

But you have you own
Dark priorities,
Residue of the single malt and the double-dome.

Dirty Ulysses, you’re late again,
Unmastered by the Sirens, barely more human
Than your brother swine—

You and all the other Mortimers out there
Who carry death like a beehive
Inside you wooden heads.

You’d better forget about
That greasy sun of run-down egg, that sausage
Like the missing link.

Take this glass of milk that must have come
From cows gone sour on the hoof,
And this flaming toast you’ve already forked up.

It’s one of those mornings when
Nothing will let you find
A shaky balance between needs and grief.

ELTON GLASER edits the Akron Series in Poetry for the University of Akron Press. His most recent book of poems is Winter Amnesties (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). In 2002, the University of Akron Press will publish an anthology he coedited with William Greenway: I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio.

“Toast” will appear in our Spring 2002 issue.

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