Poetry

Spring 2008

 

 

Michael T. Young

Broken Glass

A shattered bottle glitters on the sidewalk,
fragments dazzling the spring light
into a mesh of fence wire, a hazy net
in the warm air, like everything submerged
under the wash of memory,
caught in the refracted temptations
rising against Mother's warnings,
"Don't play with the broken glass."
"Don't touch the fire." An undertow
tugging from childhood, tapping my hand
away from the gas stove, or calling to me
from the back door as I kneeled in the alley
holding a shard up to the sky.
And in that same era of warnings,
I cut my hand on a sardine can
while trying to tear the key off
because I was fascinated by the idea of a key,
this instrument, like a password or secret language
that could open the way into some hidden place,
a place like the wound itself that left no scar
or a gleam rising from a fresh cut, a drop
glittering like a fragment of carnival glass,
the flush color of the antique vase
I remember tipping from the top shelf,
because all I wanted was to hold the sunlight,
to take in hand the dangerous brilliance
balanced along the edges of each jagged piece.

 

Hesitations

There is always waiting,
not for the usual arrivals
— the bus, the bell —
and not in the usual places
by the door or under a window,
but where the rapids' violent praise
grinds the river stones,
or steam from a sewer grate
ghosts the morning street.

I hesitate at my entrance, for its clatter,
its contagion, the odor of its meaning.
These equivocations are a kind of respect
for what was here before I came,
a hope to see what winter maples
snag in their surging limbs,
or hear the voice in light
whose only utterance is melting snow.

 

 

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