World of Glass

Birds do not look much like leaves

until fluttering leaves look, to me, like birds

because feathering is a metaphor.

Shearings are slivers trimmed from glass

and shearlings are sheep just shorn. The meaning

is in the action, not in the thing itself.

It’s the throwing of   the stone. The chip

makes a waster or cullet, something flawed,

returned to potential, so different

than flight. To leaf  is to layer

in gold. Pages are leafed through, and feather

meant flying before it became pen,

just as glass was sand before it was glass.

Sheets can be paper, or they can be glass.

An eye can be glass, can glass over, and plume

is the shape of smoke, of  birds, as if etched

on air. When the atmosphere cracks,

glass is said to weep. No fleece, no feather or leaf,

no view through the fire and glaze. Flamework

gives shape to sand. The birds take their leave.