Glassworks

Why this perpetual desire to be seeing into?
That a poem should be translucent
as the soul, the experience of experience,
written, perhaps, at a train station,
seated by a wide bay of windows—
while the baker and the lemon merchant talk below
(the poem should smell of bread and lemons).
Ultimately, we want windows, not words,
Or perhaps we want to be the poet,
not the reader of poems,
gazing again out of the window.

But for all this talk of windows, souls,
walls deserve their due: without them,
no privacy for the afternoon lovers,
draped in each other like wild silks;
no way to shut in the stove’s thick, shadowy light
and shut out the world’s bitter, toothy wild.
And for the poet, it is not
airiness and sweep and light,
but the earthen room, the wooden chair,
and the pen, cradled and spun like
the glassmith’s pipe.