The Glassblower

nurses the fragments of a thousand skies in him. Furnace for the nearest sun, ornaments in the vacuum of memoirs. Tainted flesh of his mother, her mother, and the mothers before them swept into cobalt. Must wash in sand. Melt puddles flow yellow. He has carried the hollow through countless deserts. When his childhood friends morphed into characters of tombstone chants. The crows cry, pierce burning films to stir baubled lies. To forge in silence. To trade lips for the glob of glass around a metal pipe. His beloved are paper-thin when he blows into the free end. Green tint from copper. Scores the glass into wings of hummingbirds with a chisel. Breaks it apart. His is the shape of all souls.