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Ode for Trevor

She lives in a world of her own—a world of—little glass ornaments.

How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. 

In memory, everything seems to happen to music.


My brother, too, collected glass

animals, my favorites the winged,

 the most easily shattered.

A hummingbird, a dragonfly.

A whale, flukes blue

plumes of smoke, so

I have broken

one off with entranced fingers. 

 

Finally we have escaped to the abstract—

one to music and one to words. Here the breaking

is nothing, means everything. Here the losing

saves. Here the shattering becomes apology.
 

At long last I can dance 

in the glow, 

the soft fiction

of his song, though gasping

for air, long having 

lost what keeps

me afloat. Finally

holy. Still, by all means, 

drowned, 

burning. Someday

he will exalt me.

 

And I have always been far too attached

to things, you know, shattered from the inside

at the losing, the breaking.
 

Yes, I remember.

But I think it was

a dragon. Was it 

on purpose, I ask.

No, of course

not, you were so sad

about it, you must

have cried. And there 

it is, a wing, on 

the floor of his childhood

bedroom, green, 

swirling, no bigger

than the pinky fingernail

of an eight-year-old boy. 

From Yellow Book
After and with an epigraph from Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie

Rhiannon Briggs

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