Glass Study
Lift the edge of the shale with your fingertip. Let a whale unspool in your mind. White. Killer. The organizing force of orcas. The years when “force” was a keyword you
regularly searched. Through the black pool of glass in your hand. Name the materials to render them inert if you can. Aluminum copper silver lithium neodymium lanthanum gadolinium. Yttrium allows a gladiolus to gasp back at me through a screen. What have I passed through a screen in my life besides information? Spring air. A raw egg’s clear edge before poaching. Pale dirt filled with bits of glass by a pit at the research station. 1920s, olive-green. The vineyards sat not far from where the Chinese workers lived. The soda lime glass held the wine they made and drank. The bottles broke and spread. The families had children. The borosilicate plate that daily sells my time to the world was engineered to stay intact when dropped from a height. Nanocrystals within the glass matrix increase drop performance by 4x. Through the glass matrix I can touch a thousand things I have never touched with my hand. A specific whale. A general gladiolus. The borosilicate matrix is unlike olive glass in that it has never and will never touch my lips.
The italicized phrase is paraphrased from “Apple’s Ceramic Shield may change your mind about an iPhone 14 screen protector.” https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/iphone-ceramic-shield-glass-one-year-test/
Moon Pool
The hole in the heart of the drill ship. The hole the drill pipe falls through seeking oil to pull back up. Moon pool glows blue on a calm evening. Seawater a color not a thing like the sky. At least once, moon pool must have held the moon herself. Most evenings, the sea breathes up and down moon pool’s cluttered walls, too restless for reflection. Moon pool is an absence. Seafoam drips through the drill bit’s three interlocked sets of teeth. Over time, screws in moon pool’s cement sides oxidize red and weep. Moon pool is the storm’s mouth. Moon pool can coat the rig deck in salt. In swell, moon pool boils with surge that does not glow at all. Offshore drilling requires, according to Galveston’s Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig Museum, ingenuity and collaboration. In the story where monkeys try to save the fallen moon from a well, they link their tails. They work together to reach depths no monkey can reach alone. I imagine each individual monkey feels proud of how they help. You know what happens next. What they seek to fix breaks when touched.
Buttoning in Muscatine
Clammers drop the crowfoot over the edge of the john boat. Live mussels clamp onto each hooked prong. Drug up from the riverbed and onto shore, the mussels are steamed, cleaned, and sorted by species. At least twelve freshwater species make good buttons that cut without cracking or splitting. Workers soak the new shells soft, cut out round blanks with saws. A lathe applied to a new button’s face creates a fashionable design. As does a nice shade of coal tar aniline dye. Workers drill holes in the cut blanks and polish them with muriatic acid, tumbled pumice. The shell fragment is ready to fasten garments. Workers sew buttons onto cards for sale. Boxes of finished buttons move across states to manufacturers. Workers touch each button’s face to secure it to a shirt, a purse. The shirt or purse is purchased. The button holds two halves closed. At the end of the production line, a customer unfastens the button open. In the Mississippi River, a mussel closes over a crowfoot, planning to live.
Without Thickness
the place where two halves of a closed mussel touch
shade’s slow march across the yard
wetness / not wetness at the kitchen faucet
the center of a split apple
dark pleats where teeth meet
the line that cleaves a fingernail from the whole
the whole apple, its skin touching june air
everywhere, things meet or unmeet without thickness
instead of border we tend to call it touch
Earl Bateman’s 1985 Map of the Ocean Floor
Earth without oceans appears skeletal.
Fault lines fall like split scales from a fossil
reptile’s spine. I recognize, for once, the blue
negative, the too-familiar Americas, West Africa’s edge.
The map depicts what we cannot see but hear,
undersea volcanoes and transform faults
bouncing back our technology’s shouts.
We did not know the seafloor’s face until we sensed
our way through war. Submarine detection came first,
then knowledge of the ocean floor. In this map,
the planet is really a planet, pocked with rifts
and stitches, cracked and split needle bones
of a fish. The Atlantic Rift is an ancient salamander
shivering north. The Southeast Indian Rift, a zipper’s
close-lipped secret. We bounced sounds off canyons
to make this image. Most of this planet, not governed
by sight. The map begs: can land be finite
and owned? If land is the opposite of this
submerged uncertainty, these geologic curtains
and plains and fans and spreading centers,
what can we worship? Incan constellations took shape
from negative space in the Milky Way. In the dark
where they saw no stars, a snake.
We could see that clearly, once.
In the Time When Glass is Immortal
Grandmothers will give window panes as inheritance.
The black pool that governs one’s gaze in their palm
will pop out and be passed down. Glass we daily touch,
glass we gaze through, glass conducting our reveries’
flight. Today, the televised dancer I dream of becoming
reflects off my mother’s spectacles. I sprinkle flaked food
for the minnows in our tank. My grandmother shows me
how to layer sugar between grapes she crushes
between thumb and forefinger and drops into a rinsed
juice bottle. The red skins glisten. I listen
to the Tiffany lamps in the museum flicker on.
In the 1800s, Louis Comfort Tiffany witnessed
ancient Roman and Syrian glass’s iridescence.
The veil the shards wore after burial, a beauty
Tiffany worked his whole life to recreate. He did.
He treated molten glass with metallic oxides,
pulled long-necked tulips, wine glasses of satin.
The edges of his dishes wept and bloomed.
The centers glowed the blue that pearls dream
they might become. Tiffany understood time’s
touch on an object. He crafted solids spellbinding
enough to survive the urge to discard. If a patina
can be good. If glass can be a gift. Can we make
bouquets from the sheets and panes and vessels
already forged, can we invent new colors,
new configurations of light worth seeing through?
