Ignores, if nothing else,
Its diehard brilliance where crashed on the floor
The wide bowl lies that seemed to cup the sun,
Its green leaves curled, its constant blaze undone,
Spilled all its glass integrity everywhere;
Spectrums, released, will speak
Of colder flowerings where cold crystal broke.
Glass fragments dropped from wholeness to hodgepodge
Yet fasten to each edge
The opal signature of imperfection
Whose rays, though disarrayed, will postulate
More than a network of cross-angled light
When through the dusk they point unbruised directions
And chart upon the room
Capacities of fire it must assume.
The splendid curvings of glass artifice
Informed its flawlessness
With lucid unities. Freed from these now,
Like love it triumphs through inconsequence
And builds it harmony from dissonance
And lies somehow within us, broken, as though
Time were a broken bowl
And our last joy knowing it shall not heal.
The splinters rainbowing ruin on the floor
Cut structures in the air,
Mark off, like eyes or compasses, a space
Of mathematic fixity, spotlight
Within whose circumscription we may set
All solitudes of love, room for love's face,
Love's projects green with leaves,
Love's monuments like tombstones on our lives.
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