Steuben

In these pictures on the glass,
These manufactured towns
Embedded in our wedding vase,
Clouds delicate as down,

Fragile as the lace in cotton
Candy, webs of sugar spun
From spiders’ silicon
And the smelter's lungs,

In the breath of spring
Suspended on the fields like bees
This crystal morning,
Sprung from dreams

Of air and death and sand,
Filtered through the breeze
Like spun glass stands
Of ferns, like dandelion seeds

Blown up by wind
And the planet’s hand,
As if there were an artisan
Behind the land

That heat has turned
To glass, that earth
Has turned to heath
On this revolving urn,

In its windblown bubbles sprung
From flaws, from dirt,
Rocks sleeping in the sun
And scratches grown to birch

This ecstatic summer day,
Static as a pipe, a rod
That fire shapes like hay
Or twists around to sod,

A rod that bales and rings
Our glinting sphere,
Our rounded wedding
Gift with light and air,

In an ornamental bowl,
A flattened, fashionable view,
Bits of beach made whole
With sand, with heat, with heart’s transparent glue,

My eyes today have seen
A mirror of such space,
That, grown beyond the screen
Of art, it dances on your face,
And questions every other place.


August 12th, 1986