Hey, Kid.
You're not a customer,
not a glassblower.
Still, I welcome you
here in my shop.
Stay.  Get comfy.

I drink to you,
gulp your fine, aged wine.
It's party time.  A riot
among all this glass.
We both know the start:
an amorphous glob of nothing
until an artist blows a shape
or molds liquid heat.
Vases for your ivy, a bowl
for your women's pine cones.

Such fragile stuff:  that white stallion
pawing air like me and other mortals
who dare write poems of glass.
Words break or chip on corners
if I'm careless.  You know
what I mean about the rhythm of the thing.
The way it can die on the page
or spring to life, rising up like truth.

I fetch one kettledrum,
two flutes, three musicians.  Hear
the goat song, how it stumbles along.
Our feet tangle.
The tragedy:  we fall into glass,
into untitled poems, each line etched
with one transparent shard.  Cut deep
and forget the clowns.  Their fire
extinguisher can not foam.  All show
and primary colors.  The laugh,
the cry of glass shattering.

Pieces of my world:  orange, yellow, green,
blue at my feet.  All is not crystal clear.
You are the kid twice born, the dual god
within each angled piece of glass, within me.

The comedy of clowns.  Glass to ash.
No white horse.  No Greek myth.
Only one poem emerges from such rubble.

I sew you into my thigh, Kid.
Rest awhile against my flesh.

© 2005 by Carol Carpenter. All rights reserved.