Forever Blooming, by Tricia Knoll

​Forever Blooming 

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Lovers know when a foot smashes a wine glass wrapped in a heavy napkin, fragile relationships begin. Love in pieces resists glue.
 
A mallet cracking a fire alarm cover begs for help. 
 
Baseball finds window. Windshields star-break.  
 
Fire melts the cathedral’s rose window. Sirens race toward breaking windows. 
 
Glassblowers’ learning curves include Kevlar gloves and jagged shards of error. 

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German father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschke crafted botanically perfect models of 847 plant species for Harvard’s Glass Flowers exhibit. The work spanned from 1886 through 1936. Models range from umbrella liverwort to red maple leaves. The Rotten Apples sequence follows healthy fruit through rot, mildew, rust and scab. To thank Bostonian scientist Mary Ware for financing their work, Leopold gave her a glass bouquet. 
 
A Thai meditation master said of his goblet, For me the glass is already broken. When the wind knocks his glass off a shelf or his elbow knocks it down, he will say, Of course.
 
Mary Ware died of a stroke soon after Glass Flowers opened. Her bouquet remains on display in a new shatterproof glass case.

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Each sliver of a broken mirror on the slate floor reflects the face of the woman kneeling with a whisk broom and dustpan.

Tricia Knoll

​Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose work appears widely in journals and nine collections, either full-length or chapbook. She is a contributing editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.  triciaknoll.com