BooksBarbecue
Back Break the Glass
Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Note to Reader
  4. Dedication
  5. I
  6. In prison
  7. The whitewashed walls
  8. The Leopard
  9. Even all night long
  10. I was working
  11. “As with rosy steps the morn”
  12. Dear Family,
  13. Canoe
  14. The Japanese garden
  15. Ghost Elephants
  16. On a Passenger Ferry
  17. Then Abraham
  18. Traveler
  19. Coyote
  20. Hawkins Stable
  21. II
  22. Who watches
  23. Time is matter here
  24. Earth and the Librarian
  25. Her car
  26. The World inside This One
  27. Poet
  28. (Two were seen leaving.)
  29. The treeless hill
  30. The just-born rabbits
  31. The valley
  32. On the bus
  33. The branches
  34. Red cloth
  35. III
  36. Don’t silence yourself, No te calles
  37. Eurydice who guides
  38. If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them
  39. I dropped a plate
  40. Desert Prison
  41. You ask,
  42. The Young Mother
  43. I thought It’s time
  44. On the CD, in the rainstorm
  45. Old love, I want to phone you
  46. Diana
  47. The older man among us
  48. He Disappeared into Complete Silence
  49. I am fain a page in the court of space
  50. IV
  51. Lucy
  52. My Work of Art
  53. Your Picture
  54. Outsider Art
  55. Notes
  56. About the Author
  57. Books by Jean Valentine
  58. Link
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. Special Thanks

The blue man said,

You are the forest and the bowl

—as he made a trail of tobacco, or cornmeal,

back to the foot of my chair.

Jack said,

You don’t need

a bowl. Putting his cupped hands together

in front of him on Eighth Street

—the trees walking toward us

hands cupped in the light of Eighth Street.

On the CD, in the rainstorm

in memory of Michal Kunz

On the CD, in the rainstorm

the healer whispers what he hears from his guides.

His whispers are a quiet-stepping rainstorm

stepping across the room.

Michal

—I hope you don’t mind my saying this—

sits down with us and looks up into the rain.

They say

he will write

if not his poems

other poems.

Old love, I want to phone you

I miss another body in this life.             But miss

you, turned-away?

Can I miss not-love? The centuries say

Sure possible, all the languages say, all the

bodies, the trees. Ice storms.

In her room

a student cuts angular lines

into her arm.

The blue man says, Don’t cut, they’re saying (he listens, whispers,

then he talks) they’re saying           For the present

A body by herself cán be in love on earth.

Diana

The tab on the tea bag said

“Love what is ahead

by loving what has come before.”

But what came before was no dream

you wake from, it was human sacrifice:

Diana was herself, and Actaeon, who saw her naked,

and the stag he was turned into

(who was God)

and the blind dogs

and the death of God

“for the sin of seeing.”        God

still childbearing, naked, seeing.

Do we get another life?       Oh yes.

Maybe not in this place.     Maybe in different forms.

The older man among us

The older man among us looked right through me.     Lost.

Without expression.   Long look.    Who were you?

I had a glass of water in my hand.

Are you my grandfather?     Would you like to drink?

I wished I was a horse, and I could lay

my head over your neck.

He Disappeared into Complete Silence

The wild ladders of longing

no longer pieces of wild wood, sawed off

and fitted to each other,

no longer stored in a closed-off room

with one blank window

But called back, through

the closed-off wooden ceiling, to his

speech returned.

I am fain a page in the court of space

I have pulled the elements in no order

in around me, like a blanket:

elephant blanket.

It will harden when I take it off,

my skin, when I

leave you on the ground and walk away.

A page

air

a pen

water

books

earth

friends

fire

IV

IV

Lucy

Lucy

for Sister Leslie, C.H.S.