Glass Galaxy Poem by Cathryn Hankla

The world: glass, swirls of color, irregular sine waves so distinctly interwoven that to wonder at the hard surface was to miss the liquid nature of the internal construction. I hardly knew you, yet I gave you this world, a world your palm could cup. I wanted to see if you could keep it from breaking. I wanted to see you hold it to your eye, a scientist's piercing eye of observation, measuring into the beaker. Your blue shots of sight, your ice-infused acknowledgments could shatter. Initially the object's beauty captured you, or the thought of an elixir. Unlikely for a season of cards and chocolate, an artist's world of glass, a galaxy of temperaments' collision, combustion of a brief and lasting nature. A chemical compound fused on the day I saw you without knowing who you were:

My skin struck fire.

Not nostalgia now, not mistakenly undone, but more or less a harkening that never rang true, a course that never finished but left a rupture in a single knot. Spring run aground, water halted, reins to a horse's gallop. Full stop to the soft mouth, like a pause: a full rest extended and then some written into a score. That can never be evened. The glass world, a manufactured eye replacing flesh: It was marvelous, yet the thing lost equaled so much more than its replacement.

The thing erased was living: that world we made was made to break and break.