We used to think, in our high-chair years,
in hand-worked gowns and miters,
that windows slid like rain because
their very souls were water.
Now we use the cosmic word,
shapeless itself: amorphous.
If you were in that eleven a.m. classroom
and the test said to define it, you,
sixteen, would know with rock-solid
certainty that amor-phous means "full of love."
Tomorrow we will tip the cup
that holds this estate's mirrors,
and silver and gold and perfect curls
will mingle in the goblet,
the ever-unchanging vessel.
Man-made glass has been around since the at least Bronze Age, and yet chemists and physicists are still at odds over whether it's a liquid or a solid. Some have settled on "amorphous solid." I just love this, this not knowing in the face of millennia of familiarity.
photograph of a shattered Saint Cecilia by Michael Krueger
