I see the break as a grown man
in the corner of his eye
suddenly recalls his fractured childhood;
as a surgeon examining a thin chest wound
finds the edges clean and sharp
but fears what might be accidently sewn inside
so near the victim’s rose-colored heart.
The broken front window of my house
is an iceberg shard
set adrift above the box bushes outside.
From my desk chair
I look through the eyeglass skewed,
a permanent crack of enamel
on a bicuspid,
a dagger upright,
or a half-mountain of ice.
Sail-shaped and run aground,
a sloop in the cove of a sagging sea,
or a shark fin lifting from the sill
swimming slowly east.
I’ll replace it some day
when I have nothing left to see,
like when the frozen river stops sliding
from the sharp leaning peak.