Eighteen Squares of Light

 

at andrew's--

chadd's ford, pa

Eighteen Squares of Light

 

Pentimento  n.

 

the presence or emergence

of earlier images, forms,

or strokes that have been changed

and painted over

 

It’s suddenly a memory now, made

possible because of the windows

behind me, that a car has gone through

its own mirror, emerging a fraction

of a second later, the way every

reflection figures in the light of redundancy

and glass. Imagine this: the second square in

from the left of the sash, second row up, seated

 

and solid between the unmachined muntin

coped by hand in around 1810, the glass

has seen and been seen through for these last

two hundred and more years: bird and

person and bear and doe and fox and boys

and girls going off and coming home

from all those wars and houses that rise

and that fall down into the open cellars

 

of themselves, soothing the sore throats

of the neighborhood where old windows

and nails and broken frames and maybe

one or two porcelain doll’s limbs and smashed

Wedgewood plates all past their play and practicality,

act as fill for the next foundation of grass

and lilac.  Now it’s a house wren tipping down

the wet twig of spring and stopped fleetingly

 

by her rival.  Her weight is insignificant to the tree,

her few seconds of sitting and then flitting

to the lip of the aging bird box to sing it as her own

for the next twenty or so days.  This window sees her

arrive, sees her fly off.  And too, this window

sees my last weekend’s yardwork caught off 

guard to be stormed on: shovels, cutters,

rakes, and the withering bittersweet 

 

vine still not dying, lying over the flank of the wet

wagon.  It sees how we’ve been keen to keep

the lilac and forsythia and maiden grass, freeing it

from the clutch of invasive honeysuckle vines

that thrive rooted beneath the underneath

in the unseeable dirt-night.  This glass.

Hasn’t it been considering the rise and thrive

of yard life, quiet and paneful all this time.

 

And also, consider the light itself: a time capsule

of the held breath of its maker and the present

now, a reflecting that travels back to the glass-

blower’s last exhale as he lifted the molten liquid

balloon and breathed into them to see his own

bubbles – sliding and alive, brightening in the precise

slant of light like a child’s handprint a tire drives

over every day, yet harks back to the wet

 

cement as the palm and fingers descend only to

rise up, to be pulled back and marveled at,

as it receives and then recedes, cleaving and deeply

needing the eyes behind the rib-bones the seer,

beating and breathing each to their own memories.