Ours is a unique silence, filled with questions and recoilings, a sort of silence that can only exist amid walls intimately shared. Having people who offer their love, implicitly, one has also the cool mystery of that comfort, the need that emerges from that feeling of shelter, a reason to begin to look beyond, to test for repetitions of that comfort as it takes root. This looking stills the flux of ordinary things, and a perilous freeze overtakes all of one's perceptions.

The morning is become a glassy pool. What is underfoot is glass, and the surrounding landscape is of glass. Partitions that have kept the flood away are glass, and trembling. The vessels from which every careful bit of life is sipped are glass, and one might suspect one's whole purpose were glass. Along with one's knowledge of the meaning of whole and purpose. The observations that generate these thoughts are opaquely, conspicuously, glass. Tumbling around in a congress of glass voices, distant and broken, the world begins with a single unrepentant urge, a nameless crystalline impulse. Every beginning is glass, like a cynic's anger, like faith in mathematics or the Inevitable. The notion of inevitability is glass, low-grade and prone to monumental failures. Illusions are glass, and they swim inside this pool of a morning, urgent, unrepentant.

There is a river that passes through the center of things, and it is made of glass, sometimes singular, cylindrical, unmovable, a paradox, sometimes flowing, unchecked, sharp, riven, mischievous. And at the edge of this flow, it is confirmed: this is the moment, when everything is revealed to be fragile and the whole of the known world is liable to collapse under its own terrible vitreous weight, and one knows that more than any other thing, almighty Fear is made of glass, and reckless.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

OF GLASS
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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