The Glass Path
I was eight and asleep
when the first bottle
hit the wall,
thrown across
the table below
my room.
She was crying
by the remains
of the fire. Why
is being drunk
so important to you?
I still don’t have
an answer to that.
When the rope
broke
on the candelabra
on my 40th birthday,
a bottle
of Zinfandel
slivered into
the same table
he’d perched at
for years half-cut.
I was celebrating
the age at which
he’d already
spent half his life
drunk. Picking
the stabbed shards
out, I could see how
he would always be
embedded in it,
this table at which
he’d help me
with long division.
Algebra and alcohol
was an equation
I couldn’t
add up
at this staged table
on which I’d posed,
aged six, for a portrait
whose crash
later appalled me
in the hall.
His parents’ greenhouse
fell apart
in the first storm
of this year,
a glass jigsaw
all down the garden path
leading to
the lake,
its frozen face
giving nothing away.
In the two days
it took me
to pick the pieces
up, I finally
understood
how much it had cost
him to find his path
again,
feel tomatoes bloom
every year
in that glass room
before
he went through
the windscreen.
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