ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Andrés Cerpa is the author of Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy, forthcoming from Alice James Books (January 2019). He was raised in Staten Island, New York, and spent many of his childhood summers living with his grandparents in Puerto Rico.
At the Water
Mud; the early frescos I left in a lean-to, in the slats & the wine dark
by the shore.
They wait in the distance with the rest of my sleep, as the tugboats pass
through an industrial blur.
I am again watching this place, from a dull green civic, waiting to enter.
Then the radio goes dim. The car door goes mute. The oil-slick night
takes its rag to my jaw.
Where I drew god's answer to Job, a woman, balanced on the tracks
of the Staten Island railroad, fifty years shut down sometime in my youth,
is flooding tonight.
Behind her, an open window, gull white razors & the last child
throwing bread into the light as the birds follow.
In the distance, the tracks continue, rusting over the water while the slats
drift out.
I come to this shore, a frame on the abyss, because it feels like myself: tired
& trying
to move from halogen to a shimmer on the water.
This gets old & I get older, stubborn, but the place becomes a friend.
How could it not when this world is so often the bulletproof box at the deli
revolving,
the moment when the figure behind the glass becomes opaque & it seems
as though
nothing has entered.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
