Chris Santiago
The Glassmakers
Everything they shaped for us was horses.
And who would contradict them?
It was their island & had been
for seven hundred years.
Fire
beat beneath new coronets of light:
with a pinch they make the pastern,
the cannon bone, the stifle.
Music, Goethe said, is liquid architecture
& architecture frozen music
but I would swear by the horses.
Neither lives
forever; they only seem to
in the moment; the centuries;
the high tides & slow sinking.
We buy one for our youngest
though we know the foreleg
will break. How he cries
when it does, not an hour
after becoming his.
There’s a sound
like a fist closed over wind chimes—