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Jake Ricafrente
CONCERNING GLASS
I won't begin with bending light—
we've had so many of those before
—though light's the thing that
catches almost every time: on the
smoothed rocks, say, of a terrarium
against which I pressed my warm
cheek and think: this diurnal frog
will never understand refraction.
The last time I broke a glass, my
father's dog came to lick the shards.
Even the crass vet, sixty and unblinking
when the Shih Tzu shit on his glossy
magazines, recognized the ugly thing.
My last good teacher had a glass eye
he called 'Cong. Blue-stained, it
turned in its socket and saw me better
than his vital eye: trite at twenty,
not much better the next year. And upon
straight stare, I found within that false
pupil something like Manhattan in a
snowy globe. At times, he'd blink
to wet that eye. Each time, I froze.
I've left chap stick smears on the lips
of cocktail glasses, raked agar with a
lab pipette. I've worshipped out of
glass-bottomed boats, left steams and
cracks and wiped-up rings of sweating
pop on tabletops, been roused from
heavy dreams by hail and rain and winds
against it, the certain sound of certain
cities falling, useless, before it.
Before tonight it over, we must stone
this terrarium to forget ourselves, but
it won't end there. No, because in
prehistoric Palawan, there wasn't any
glass, and that was fine. We used the
deepest streams to see ourselves, punched
holes into the walls, and sipped from
cupped palms. On reflection, the dogs
roamed free, the frogs were left alone.
The best part of bathing was piqued skin.
And it is not an observation on this
civilization to say that we were happy.
WHITE PLASTIC
How old were we when everything we knew
began to fail? Dad’s bleeding heart, the Blue
Bell Ice Cream down the road, those sexy lies
of circumnavigation, that the sky’s
not really blue. How old when rules were bent
to fit the ruse? A half-breed, some percent
of full. I meet
them now, their smiles are pressed
and cool. Aunt Something with a pool suggests
I summer in Poughkeepsie with “The Fam.”
I laugh and take a second bite of ham,
potatoes mashed, a buttered roll. I doubt
they watch their words. They gather round to scout
strabismal eyes, my skin Sahara brown.
How old were we when every form and down-
town play promoted “other” as a race?
I can’t recall when Pilgrims were replaced
by Salem hoards. There’re hugs now as aunts pack
some plastic loads of white into white sacks.
©
Jake Ricafrente 2007 |
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