The Glass Blower —Danielle Beazer Dubrasky
We follow the Spanish Trail past Bunkerville,
a town that harbored fall-out to its bones,
a road that dips and rises along hills, then crosses I-15
and disappears north to Caliente where we look out the window
at miles strung between telephone poles. Years have narrowed
our eyes into the couple at the casino breakfast who study laminated menus
to order the “Deuces Special”—2 eggs, 2 slices of bacon,
2 sausage links, 2 pancakes. We don’t say a word while we eat.
The asphalt glints of mirages and we are sure that if we just drive
over the next crest there will be an oasis clear enough to drink.
I remember in high school the artist at the mall who shaped molten glass
into cats curled on a mirror or deer grazing suburban shelves.
Each week I returned after class to choose a different hand-spun creature
before buying lip gloss at other kiosks. Almost 30 years later the menagerie
sleeps in bubble wrap—rabbits, foxes, lambs—stored in our basement,
beside a box of volcanic glass collected from hikes through dormant peaks.
Two peach-colored kissing birds sat atop a heart on the wedding cake
but broke in the last move. I walk an obsidian labyrinth west of town,
place my old Self at the center, retrace the path out the rock circle,
and face renewal at an ancient shoreline across the valley.
The setting sun turns the hematite of red hills molten in its crucible,
spins shells of animals long since gone into sandstone.
