Holding One Candle

By Glenn Marchand

PROMPT—Never will I forget ...

A man isn’t right until he fathoms his curse. A woman becomes all things to ensure salvation. And what keeps us going the pride of the castle, those eyes, needing as it were, deprived of us. I regroup. To tug upon what keeps us going: the pleasures of what I can’t be, the happiness that sustains a younger wit. It’s not to become something special, it was given to us, through excruciating hells. Some get agitated, as if one could turn displeasure off. I find pleasure in a cold brew, a nice meal, void of my expectations—so wrong in self-appraisal, fraught by righteousness, the rules, the laws, the measures; to accuse a man, to put a man through hell, and years later force an apology. It’ll be those waves, it doesn’t change a fact, two are decent, needless of qualification. To float a kite with a child; to make a pie with a seed, to laugh like something is famished. The majesty of those good times; the human soul, chasing one final exhaustion. I lost it at points, to imagine what keeps sunshine going, needing to give credence to origin, to have watched it, one was made to serve as an example. A harsher reality. A deeper implication. To serve what might not receive us. I heard about a rock bearing witness. I listened to a rainbow as a sign. A man from invisibility received tithes from a forefather. Therewith pains, gathering wells, to lay eyes on a soul, to die in parts, to give sanity to possess life.

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Glenn Marchand is a poet-writer speaking to various realities created by the human condition. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mount Saint Mary’s University. In exploring religious and scientific truths, Marchand carefully employs observations. It is with a sense of pleasure and enthusiasm that Marchand presents his prose poems. Each one was written with an eye on enlightening the author and given audience. He writes from San Jose, California.