Poetry
HOURGLASS
His fingernails must look like how a candle-lit room must appear
When gazed upon by a snow-beaten traveller through night-edged windows.
His knuckles are stars; his pores are bulbs; every line and wrinkle a radiant thread.
These hands of light stroke two glass globes, and his cheeks,
Rainbow-veined, blow air and life into each. He flattens one end of both
With sun-kissed palms, caps these lucent pears in silver.
Two baubles of an hourglass he’s made, two transparent teardrops,
And with a puff of air cools their gleaming skins. With a touch, a kiss
Of melted glass, he forges a join between them.
The sand streams. A slim-waisted figure, with a torrent inside;
Joined at that inevitable juncture, the singular corms blossom, and solidify,
But all the while, time is slip-slipping by, grain by grain, a second a seed.
A touch, a kiss too far, and quick as that: shattered. So long, so long
In the forging, one the same as the other; the bubbles burst, and divorce each other,
Each tiny shard finding its place in the universal shag-pile, lost between dark threads,
Too spread, too remote to find themselves again. The bright hands ball,
And the sand is gone; blown into the wind. Those globes of glass are crystals now.
Their time together has ended.