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Bruce Bond
Glass

I call each pastoral a stranger now,
each bridge the hideaway I parked below
with a girl, my first, and as we stared,
we fell into a trance between the words.
Just us and the drizzle inside the low
beams across the gulf of the arroyo.

Each headlamp laid down a horizon,
a column of light, as we too lay down
among the oaks that crackled in the margins.
One childhood ends, another begins.
Just when I think, at last, April comes.
Another fog rises through the stanchions.

I will always be small beneath this bridge.
A dashboard lighter will welter and fade.
An earing wire will slip back through
its imperceptible scar. I do not know
why I wrote her name with a finger
in the windshield mist. If history returns,

it returns with a tin of rings and ashes.
What I lost, the trust I relinquished
or refused, words I cannot hear to mourn,
they are the scent of rain after the storm
breaks into a thousand embers, stars flash,
the name on the windshield turns to glass.

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