Rewrite your memories so snow doesn’t fall soundless
BY GRACE PURSEL
He disappeared in the dead of winter —
there was likely a sound but no one to hear
so you imagine your own: slipped out the back door,
misstepped off the Earth; for you it could have been silent.
The next week your father took the cat out back and
shot her. That was not soundless.
Maybe you did hear, but you don’t like to lie:
half your memories are fake, the other half things you fixed, now dry and blackened — besides,
someone has to watch the museum in the garage (50 cent admission), your inheritance of
shattered glass, but like I said, it’s different.
When the oak is shot through with electric heat, it echoes,
and you wind a rope round the split trunk like sutures and know he would have stapled the bark
together with shards of stained-glass window, hung blown art from the rotting branches, and called it
happy —
he, the once curator of this museum of shattered glass,
said you can tell when it splintered by analyzing the breaks; there are a multitude of fixes but leave it,
he’d say, you know if you let it lie it becomes
something else entirely.
He’d say, “caught like flurries in the headlights.”
When you look at the glimmer of the asphalt, you say, “glass so fine.”
