Birthday Poem
Mortal Love
The History of Paisley
Notes
About the Author
Also by Paisley Rekdal
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special thanks
I
MURANO
It is not miraculous. Only a handful of silica, fire,
and then the blower twirls another knob of gold
on his metal pontil, dipping the tip into a pot
inlaid with spikes to make the burning globe
twist in upon itself as the man breathes out
and a thin neck bulges, wreathes into a spiral
like a unicorn horn; but we’re bored, he’s
bored, blowing and blowing the same shape over.
It takes no effort. He stares off through one
of the factory windows as he does it, beneath a sign,
No Flash, a red line drawn through a cartoon camera
to indicate the work is private, dangerous.
The man’s tongs pinch out a chest, a neck, the crowd
applauding each development though it has seen
the same thing around the corner.
We know what will come next. The man
reaches into the bright elastic to yank
a fat neck forward, to pinch out hair, a shovel-
shaped face; to pull out one thin, bent leg
and then another, the glass itself now tinged with ash
as the fire runs out of it, dimming to topaz,
caramel. He splashes water on the irons
to make them smoke. It must be dangerous, this
material, or why else would we watch?
The blower has a bald patch, earrings, scars.
He dips his tongs once more into the figure
and out come back legs, a tail. The neck twists
and now the little face has a mouth that’s open,
screaming. Transparent hooves tear into the air.
The tail’s curled filament starts to thread
as the pontil pulls away. You want to say
“like taffy,” but don’t. It is not sweet.
Only a spark of heat and then the inevitable
descending numbness. Someone laughs.
Someone takes a photo. For a moment, the room
fills with light behind which we hear
the scissor’s dulling snap.
Our senses return stretched thinner, fine.
We can almost feel the shattering of the glass.
BUBBLES
The child purses his lips around a hole. Blows
and out the radiant world swells forth.
The park swings bend. His mother’s face shrinks
to the size of a bubble. I sit across from them,
on my separate bench, bobbing past in its reflection.
It’s my gift, this vial of soap.
I bow my dark head low as my friend’s son
pats my cheeks in thanks, obediently
sucks in another breath
and blows.
“Any fool can make soap;
it takes a clever man to sell it.”
So Thomas Barratt, 1880, said, and pursued Millais
to paint Pears’ advertising: an English painter
for an English soap. “Of two countries
with an equal weight of population,” he wrote,
“the most highly civilized will consume
the greatest weight of soap.” A quote
from my scholar friend in her book
on bubbles that she’s given me: my gift
of this toy a nod to her descriptions
of palm oils rendered in chains
of vats, thickened with the meat
of African coconuts.
Through a stream of bubbles,
I watch her wipe her son’s streaked face, recall
my washing machine at home which has a setting
labeled Baby Clothes. The store model
wore a pink-and-blue sign reading,
Don’t You Want One? I think
of the painting on her book’s cover, Newton’s
Discovery of the Refraction of Light: a thin-faced scientist slumped
in dark, while his nephew, by a bank of windows,
blows bubbles. On Newton’s side of the canvas:
a dusty globe, a world of shadows
that dissolves beside
