Glassman

Yesterday I met a man sitting by an ice-glass lake.

I didn't see his snowy beard

and I completely ignored his face.

All my attention attached itself to his fingers

And all my thoughts--my vapor thoughts--condensed and settled

as tears

before my eyes and there they froze

most stubborn

stillborn

Till they became glass, ice-glass, organic lenses to focus

my sight--

--my insight and foresight and hindsight and true sight,

on the glass man's fingers.

They were mangled, the fingers, and gnarled

like charred stubs

of a paper tree--

--paper that had once held words

and memories

but is now

scoured

and chewed out.

And I watched through my marble-tear lenses

as he held up a pipe,

a solid affair of iron wood--mahogany--ordinary

and blew through it a ball of molten fire,

and, as I watched, the fire hardened,

into light and a heavy orb

of cranberry-orange ice.

But then I blinked,

and the vision shattered,

and my tears broke and the ice-shards clattered

as they hit my face.

A moment later they melted and the world dissolved

into marmalade skies and apple liqueur,

Because the glassblower had

fashioned, from ice, from sugar-dusted air,

and fingers broken and unrepaired,

the Sun.