MTC Cronin
3 Poems from Real Glass Things
The Glass Bear
We’re going on a bear hunt.
We’re going to catch a big bear.
I’m not scared.
No I’m not.The bear is made of glass.
I see through its growl to no bear.
We break it.
We cut ourselves on our courage.The Glass Vignette
One day, with a bucket of sand given to him by his ancestors a
man tried to invent glass but instead found time slipping through his
fingers like clear water, the grains of sand falling far enough apart to
see through. And through them, as if he could not make mistakes, as if
they were rain on the other side of a window, he saw the sandpiling
winds and knew that time would build its own edifice, first dune, then
stone, then glass, and that what was built would defy his ignorance to
stand and fall in its own time. This vision is how the sand in his hands
performed first a somersault, then cartwheels, then dressed itself in his
vision and became transparent. When asked of the glistening pane he
held, its use and its genesis, he would simply say: The dreambeasts
are hard to tame, hard to make wild.The Glass Jumping Spider
This little spider can jump
without shattering.
If I step on it I feel the sharp pain
in my brain,
in my beautiful spinning chandelier
of thoughts.