Mark Irwin

Mother came to visit today. We hadn’t seen each other in years. Why didn’t you call? I asked. Your windows are filthy, she said. I know, I know. It’s from the dust and rain. She stood outside. I stood in, and we cleaned each one that way, staring into each other’s eyes, rubbing the white towel over our faces, rubbing away hours, years. This is what it was like when you were inside me, she said. What? I asked, though I understood. Afterwards, indoors, she smelled like snow melting. Holding hands we stood by the picture window, gazing into the December sun, watching the pines in flame.

“The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.” They are bodies of the selfless or of those newly dead. What appears transparent is really flame burning so brightly it appears like glass. What you’re looking through is the act of giving: One thing in life needed desperately, given to another, or perhaps life itself. The most beautiful bodies are not transparent, but sometimes the color of lead, like the elephant whom a child with some peanuts lifts by the trunk in his hand in the swirling dust, so that it appears he has lifted a monument or a city with all its pain. The bodies that seem transparent are made of an ice so pure it appears to be glass sweating, where you, desiring another, glimpse your own face that weighs nothing and is burning.

The hummingbird hovers over bougainvillea, darting in and out of blossoms as the bride throws her corset among laughter and waving hands. Seeing you, glass in hand, sunlight piercing the punch bowl’s crystal, I remember the horse, an Appaloosa, the white and gray markings like clouds, cumulus, one later on his grave, the 2X4 cross with name above a swell of land that could bring a man to his knees, or make him look up at fumbling shapes, cotton-fumed and slow. I can hear the screeching still.The colt had grabbed a turkey nesting in scrub oak, and prancing, shook it in his mouth as we ran reaching toward black feathers—then the fine spray of blood—until beyond adrenaline we began laughing,

He wore a little spiraled hat and wrote a song that everyone sang. He lived on the mountainside above a lake with a mythical beast he’d subdued. A train circled the village each hour, over and over, as he leaned down over the clock of   his world where people were days becoming months and years. In a park, from the hides of  ten cows, he’d constructed a  giant ball that everyone touched until it became a torn rag. He had no family, and because he worried so much about them:What if, what if, what if, like another beast pawing away, he’d invented a vitamin for everyone old that allowed you to continue slowly to grow until you forgot everything you once knew.