Ode To Broken Things

Things get broken

At home

Like they were pushed

By an invisible, deliberate smasher.

It's not my hands

Or yours

It wasn't the girls

With their hard fingernails

Or the motion of the planet.

It wasn't anything or anybody

It wasn't the wind

It wasn't the orange-coloured noontime

Or night over the earth

It wasn't even the nose or the elbow

Or the hips getting bigger

Or the ankle

Or the air.

The plate broke, the lamp fell

All the flower pots tumbled over

One by one. That pot

Which overflowed with scarlet

In the middle of October,

It got tired from all the violets

And another empty one

Rolled round and round and round

All through winter

Until it was only the powder

Of a flowerpot,

A broken memory, shining dust.

And that clock

Whose sound

Was

The voice of our lives,

The secret

Thread of our weeks,

Which released

One by one, so many hours

For honey and silence

For so many births and jobs,

That clock also

Fell

And its delicate blue guts

Vibrated

Among the broken glass

Its wide heart

Unsprung.

Life goes on grinding up

Glass, wearing out clothes

Making fragments

Breaking down

Forms

And what lasts through time

Is like an island on a ship in the sea,

Perishable

Surrounded by dangerous fragility

By merciless waters and threats.

Let's put all our treasures together

-- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold --

Into a sack and carry them

To the sea

And let our possessions sink

Into one alarming breaker

That sounds like a river.

May whatever breaks

Be reconstructed by the sea

With the long labour of its tides.

So many useless things

Which nobody broke

But it got broken anyway.