Glass House (Patent Specification 494,452)
4 Minutes Read Time
There was a sandpit. Conveyor belt,
sludge pond, river
of glass. There were halls
for pouring and for polishing,
mixing room, a building to house the boilers.
Director’s villa. Administration. Depot,
canteen, workshop, and a room
for fellowship. Kiln room,
kindergarten, apartments for workers,
the owner’s family home
on the city’s market square.
Plate glass, wired glass, opaque
and mottled, mirrors, bulletproof:
ways to make all manner
of passages for light. Glass polished
on round, wide tables, rotating,
plates fixed into plaster
by dancing wood-shoed men.
Boudin glass poured and rolled, the great drums
turning. Halls full of sheets cooled and cut
to measure. Spun-
glass fibers wound on
spools. Opaxit tiles slicked
the earth’s insides, five thousand pale square meters
in Potsdamer Platz drew commuters’ dreams across
white gloss as they sped under
the world out to their lives
that handed down to us the days we touch
today. All the surfaces
we passed our fingers over
when as children we walked home,
grazing a wall, bumping hands
along the links or bars
of metal fences, tearing a leaf off
when we felt its face. Barriers
we hit up against. All
the webs we weave ourselves
into. The spaces between the threads.
We peer to capture traces. Madame
Bovary and
countless women
in the pages of old novels
look out at the world from behind their windows.
They didn’t make the glass. Glass mountains, glass slippers,
sand that cuts like shards beneath
new feet where the fish-
tail split, the mermaid’s foam now washed up on
the sands, waiting, for the in-
evitable, the glassed and
covered carriages carrying
characters to their despoilment.
The girl played a glass har-
monica, spanned notes across the trembling
resonances, whispered German
verses in my ear, abyss
of longing wrought
from fingers placed on fragile, rounded
vessels cast, just so, to tune the notes
into exqui-
site harmonies. She
named the tones, turned them to strings, spun
the fibers from the sound onto a spindle,
yarns in richest colors, drew a brush, white, across
the canvas of the night. She
painted light. She painted
time. Painted the quiet. I watched her through
the glass. Dark paint-smudged curls, white
petticoat, wide patchwork skirts,
there was unity between
outside and in, just for
minutes. Maybe the flax
grows in the field not just for weaving
but for waving blooms in awe up
to the sky. Blue to blue.
Maybe the cells that form
the fibers keep some of that yearning
past the softening and the pounding
after harvest.
Maybe the linen
dish towel whose shreds dissolve be-
tween my fingers still remembers something of
the field and sun from which it came. A previous
century, an ocean and
a continent away.
Red cloth, white flower woven down its length
in white brocade. Where the
pattern was worked, the linen
did not fray. A painted icon
on my parents’ wall, purchased
in Poland years ago:
Mary painted on the glass, but from
behind. The surface facing us
untouched. Her flax-blue robe all
seeded with a hundred
flowers, her curls, crown, an orb in one hand,
framed in dark brown wood. The tensile strength
of glass fibers
spun according to
patent number 494,452
is much greater than with previous
methods. And then the patents for making wired
glass: Wires soldered together,
instead of twisted, make
a stronger, smoother sheet in several
pattern options. See what they
came up with: hexagon, square,
diamond, triangles, designs
the patent lithographer
etched in 1932
to echo the inventor’s sketch. Pour glass
over the filaments to freeze
the web in place. I have
not lost the thread here. I
touch the surfaces and try to look
ahead. The doors of this glass house can
open backward
or forward. Fronts and
borders shifted. My family
gathered up its losses; it carries them still.
I know the house they built held hurts I cannot heal,
and we all may
be born into unrooting. No past
that I might hope
to mend with all
my neat and careful
stitching.
Read more from Issue 23.1.
