Glass Art

My sister shatters glass and makes it art-
aqua dreamscapes, stacks of multicolored shards.
Playground scenes where light laughs, gentle
as a razor's touch,
prisms light escapes in pretty splinters.

Make a blown glass female figurine, I tell her,
arms upstretched, torso thrown off-balance,
call it Melted Woman, but no, she says:

I like glass in its aftermath-
shattered storefronts, escalated arguments,
the spiderwebby patterns
when windshields won't take turns,
the wholeness of the goblet
irretrievable under the groom's heel.

Oh sister, make another work for me,
call it Bouquet of Broken Lightbulbs:
Lace-gloved hands clutch filamentous skeletons,
necks of jagged, frosted glass,
the fragments of each shattered dome
a chalkwhite puzzle pattern
that lets this red rug bleed up around each piece-

as if ideas could explode like that,
as if the current trapped inside those wires
leapt up to seek its sister, lightning, in these clouds.








Voices

I

Sunlight threads its way through curtain lace
and slides with liquid ease across my barefoot arch,
its late afternoon ascension now familiar.
The lemon glow of polished oak ignites;
in turn it lights the Royal Doulton figurines,
each in frozen perfect pose.
Those gowns of delicate opacity
leave breasts and shoulders
almost purely bare, clayly pale. On their maiden curves,
no purple bruises bloom from under surgical tape,
each catgut stitch a window closed,
a hope bled dry.

The lace-light ages orange, its rising arc
a perfect counterpoint
to the sliversinking sun;
it converges, sharpens, lengthens into swords,
tips stretched, toward the thin-skinned ceiling;
the anniversary clock cries out, its Roman numeral face
and computer-chip chime unite: "gone, gone, gone"---
I ask the God of Now You Tell Me, the one I call
Just In Case,
Flip A Coin,
Mother May I:
"Freeze this last light in place
and I will sieve it, bright,
with perfect motivation,
among the shadows that, until now,
have speckled all my best intentions----"
when its sudden final flameout leaves me gray as dusk.

II

Five-thirty sharp, a lab tech locks the door and leaves,
pizza next for sitter and the kids,
homework, housework always waiting.
The latest batch of slides are stained and tagged and ready to be read;
the sleepless midnights each one represents,
the "Will I die? When will I know?" by now fall noiseless
from her shoulders:
"Of course I can't read your slide now,
just this once---
each batch is always urgent.
No one cheats the God of Waiting,
the God I call
Take A Number.
When it's my mother's turn to wait,
or mine,
you think my place here
gives me special grace?
My saving you from this
saves me?"

III

Our mothers once had names like "epithelium".
They knew their places:
layers, linings, gentle graceful folds.
Each nearest neighbor's surface bound and tagged them
with tight, specific code.
No questions: "What to do? How to be?" tore their nuclei,
but longing's slow accumulation called us,
tangled, broke our chromosomes,
let us swell enough to blur our borders,
slip the grip of matrix,
seep through basement membrane,
and steal away,
free.

Among the muscle and gut, bone and brain, we roam,
cry out, we ask our God, the one we call No Place No Name,
"Where do we belong?"
Again, again we ask;
again, again, we're answered,
until we clog a capillary,
catch and hold in a lymph gland,
are caught on a slide.

We suck a body gaunt with our longing.

IV

Again the clock awakens,
its midnight chime splits yesterday, tomorrow,
and in that breath between, the Voice:
"You call me Might/Might Not,
Either/Or,
as if that makes me
Else.

I Am Who Am,
Time No Time,
Any, Ever, All.

Anoint this scar with passion's ashes:
we all are left bereft.

Belong,
while you still can,
to the knifestab Now,
to the quick-gone Here,
to the breath that floods these lungs and leaves
without your ever knowing how
or how much longer."