Jesse Glass 


EVENT

If it's growing inside you 

 no blessed event, but 

 one more empty soup tin 

 for seven, & if 

 
it's riding in on a blade of light 

 whirling into the eye--moonbeams & 

 shrapnel in the belly somehow melding, 

 rusting, growing hooks, taking root 

 & nothing on television makes it better 

 
no sweat-stained sheet 

 to wrap your head in, shield it 

 from lion light 

 
you may call skin on skin 

 if it feels good, 

 if the song plays loud enough 

 and times beyond boring--love 

 or not, & perhaps if it grows to be Einstein 

 playing his violin at the Berlin airport 

 mugging for reporters in grainy black & white 

 or just another angry face & lungs 

 
dragging at the sky, another 

 finger scratching sweat to blood & lips 

 lapping murky water 

 & no Saint 

 squatting in garbage hell 

 pockets full of granulated 

 milk can make it better. No 

 binding the sun-parched 

 pair of breasts 

 beneath a skull 

 shaved lighter than gravity 

 
will reverse the entropy of 

 (SIGN HERE), therefore 

 forcing it to remain 

 merely an event 

 among a state of affairs, 

 
flower of brutal oaths 

flower of hemorrhagic coughs 

 
a vector of energies 

 (veering dragonflies 

 rapidly losing force), 

 even a butterfly of bone 

 convulsing on a truck bed, soon 

 stacked somewhere like cord wood 

 dried tendons tight as harp strings 

 
yet who will heal those intervals 

 or stir the mundane plectrum for the song 

 
if it's growing there inside you. 

 
Copyright 2000, Jesse Glass 
 


Jesse Glass grew up on a horse farm near Westminster, Maryland. He currently lives and works in Kyushu, Japan. His plays, poems, performance works, and fiction have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies in English, and have been translated into several languages. He is working on a prose work on slavery in antebellum Maryland for publication by Ahadada Books this year.  http://www.letterwriter.net/html/jesse-glass.html 


Switched-on Gutenberg/Vol. 4, No. 2 

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