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?
