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