Wax and Glass
    Thomas Bolt  
          
  What we see through
We believe in differently.

But glass laid on glass
Can darken eerily,
Stacked clarities
Lose themselves

In graying depths,
Drop step by step
Down dimmed infinities
Into staggered void
To falter far within,
Reflections swallowing
And swallowed by
Dense blanks
Anyone who’s tried
To look through glare
Will recognize,
Eclipsing clarities
Pane by pane until
They deny as a group
What each alone
Admitted carelessly.

Things deepen in thought,
Take on unwanted curves,
Open repeated doors
Onto other doors
As facing mirrors
Veer into compressed
Feedback-perspectives
Where reflection’s trapped.
Flattered. Sandwiched,
Collapsed, lost amid layering,
As the image of a face
Is outlived, left:
A telescoping plastic waterglass
I had at six
Would fold up with a clap
To compact translucency.
Cracked, it dripped.
Crookedly pulled out
It revealed its structure:
Rings within rings, tapering
So each gripped next.
Imperfectly; yesterday
Our windows made
Wet mirrors, graphite-backed,
A blind gray flow
My lover looked into:
As blurred breath made
Opaque transparencies,
She looked down, down
Into lapped densities, negative
Nacre, mica burnt;
Yet every glare-ghost,
Every echo-locking glance
Reflected intelligence.
She could see the anti-clear
In a flat pane
Raised dripping from a stream,
Or a blown bottle
Flowering from breath,
All structure and iridescence
But unevenly rational,
Bubbles trapped in it.
Known limits hurt.
“I have a clumsy mind....”
She turned away.
Rain ticked on glass.
Hard to penetrate
Just far enough to see
Deep gray denials bend
Down through reflection, lost.
Those layers absorb us.
Reflections tarnish too,
Flake by flaw,
As fused emulsion bubbles,
Bevels chip,
Old glass takes on
Unreadable patinas.
For her warm tears
I offered a trapped
Pillar of water, clear and cool:
She looked down into the glass.
Deflections multiply.
What mirrors read,
Reversing only space,
Is time (and our thoughts).
The wafer on her wrist
Is also (although ticking) an idea,
Like the wax clock carved
From hoarded tallow
By a prisoner
With time on her hands:
An idea wick’d and lit.
Its bees’ works turn
In a glowing case;
It flickers and drips,
And waits on temperature.
Or else a glass clock clicks,
Crystal escapements sing
As when a wetted fingertip
Firmly rounds a goblet’s rim.
Lean in to study the works:
If the face is glass,
A breath makes it opaque.
As in a well-lit dream,
You see me seeing you see;
You feel me feeling you, felt.
We think we think
(Polishing quartz,
Fixing mercury flat,
As if, the objective clamped,
The shimmering poison trapped
Between heavy panes,
We might be free
To do more than reflect).
Tears cool. Stacked paraffin
For sealing jamjars
Comes out of the box
In wafers: thick, opaque,
Cake laid on cake—
Almost translucent, almost not.
Is it this or stacked glass?
Opaque transparencies,
Or sometimes-translucent
Opacities? A candle-clock,
Its honey-yellow wax
Marked in black nicks
With Roman numerals,
Burns by our bed,
Lit and relit
Hour after hour,
Ours into ours,
Until well past sex.
As the wick burns,
Wax enters the air,
Precipitates to nothing
Very substantial—
Smoke against glass,
While seconds quicken to the molten rim
And drip. Drip.
A “clumsy mind” may be
The depth from which
Unknown opacities
May almost mirror
Almost what we are—
Were. Gone, given up,
Already residue.
Potential falls and rises
Like our breath-
moved ribs, our skin.
Comfort? A kiss?
An hour will dissipate.
But let it ooze and gather until then
Like beeswork framed
In sweet, enticing wax
Until each cell’s hex,
Honey-stocked, replete,
Returns its stored life.
On the escalator
We descend floor by floor
Into the megastore
Where we will pause
Among phased dreams
Of silvering black-and-white
Or spectral Vibracolor,
Letterboxed. Against glass,
Swarming pinpoints form
Another story, layered,
Repeatable. To be happy
Within one’s limitations?
Thinking, at an angle to time,
I felt the fast breath
Of future rain: sky
Ominous, generous,
About to storm.
When inclusions eat away
Our living room,
What we can’t see past
Will see through everything:
Uncertainly, we look
Into failing mirror
Freckled and flecked with age,
Unsilvering to black:
Glazed asphalt, melt.
Cars cool, windshields repeat
(We almost see in; almost—
Too many transparencies
To cloud or freeze;
As mineral particles crystallize,
Opaque considerations
Frame each fault
And stay. Stay framed.
Are part of us and it).
No, I told her, No,
It’s something else...
Unexplained spills,
Ideas, a city plan—
But then we live here.
Between what resists
And what gives up its grain,
I think, you think,
We think we (feeling) think:
Like love, like time,
Thought radiates parentheses.
((((((((((I))))))))))
Wavered in thought
Over the powdered glare,
The ground-glass frost,
The snow-cold knowing.
Forgotten problems
Sometimes solve themselves;
Lost reference drifts.
A brittle crystal snaps.
More easily molded, wax
Can soften on skin,
Respond to the warmth of a hand;
Can flicker the mind’s glass
And make it smoke.
Though tapers finger the pane,
Aglow on nightglass,
We lean toward a lit screen
Where a helicopter beats
Over spotlit water,
Making circular waves.
A new idea comes down
Amid noise and wind,
Drops a swinging ladder
To offer above the pitch
Of fast black chops
Its dangerous rescue.
I drank from a telescope.
Which life is real?
This one. Then does day
Involve our dreams
As dreams absorb our days?
Are we opaque to logic,
Transparent with need
(Decisions made before
We know we make them),
As her eyes both take and withhold
Sun’s wrinkling flash?
She turns from the window,
From the rain’s dull time
Still beating on the pane,
To me: no dream exists
But this one, was and is.
A heart holds all of time.
Its beat asks life
And answers: answers: asks.
Despite chill drippings on the sill—
Diagonal bead-blow
Down rattled glass,
A single-colored sky,
The heat-suck
Of moisture in the room
Making it castle-cold—
The cup folds up with a clap.
We remember not much.
We cannot see ahead;
Behind us dims.
Though we may touch
What limits us
Together, free and clear,
Dense and prisoned in,
If dreams play with our days—
As if reflecting in us,
Blurred with breath
And layering
This waking clarity
On memories stacked,
Repeating, almost lost—
Relax again;
Look deep, but settle for
An infinite glimpse.
...Unless dreams play with dreams,
Dark in recession,
Dimming, until gone.

 
    

"Wax and Glass" first appeared in Epiphany.





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"Wax and Glass" copyright (c) by Thomas Bolt. All rights reserved.