I'd like to read a poem called The Glass Paperweight.
But I should have brought it with me.
I just got one of Arizona.
You know those little paperweights
that have snow scenes inside and you shake them up and it snows?
Well, I have about 50 of them.
And every place I go, every airport, I just buy everything
they have, all of them.
So I have one from Holland.
I didn't go to Holland.
Someone gave that to me.
But I've got them from everywhere.
Now I have three from Arizona with little road runners
running in the snow.
[LAUGHTER]
I also bought one today with a cowboy and Indian
shooting each other on a seesaw.
[LAUGHTER]
I can't wait.
If there's an earthquake, they're all
going to snow at the same time.
The Glass Paperweight.
The poem is in two parts.
Over the rooftops, the city's green horizon
shines through the terrarium on the sill.
My plants flourish in their tropics.
The green smell of weather is the way life smells,
an oasis breathing.
Who navigated the ship into the bottle or the message
in the bottle that reads, rescue, an island?
Before my windows, I lean out like a figurehead
against the glass as against a great wind.
In the mind of the island's one survivor,
the rescuer is always sailing toward his other self
who swims to meet him.
Is the paperweight, this blizzard in my palm,
my own dream of escape?
Inside, a man splits logs the width of toothpicks.
Snow falls through the liquid air,
or the snow has just fallen, and the sky is clear.
A carved backdrop of Swiss Alps leads a blue stripe
down the careful line of evergreens
and continues melting onto the cottage roof.
Beneath, I imagine, something good is cooking.
Decaled on the kitchen window, a woman's face.
Smoke hangs over a tiny chimney like a parachute that
never lands.
Throughout the snowstorm, there is a sunset going on,
as the woman watches the child in the sled, whose
cap is coated with the identical blue Alp.
A snowstorm is always about to happen.
Here is a country under siege.
The children in the cottage feel the world tip over
and, with an astronaut's notion of gravity,
turn over in their beds and dream.
But the child in the sled in the paperweight
is always caught outside, regardless of the weather.
He stares at the sky that is always collapsing and sees
my magnified lunar face rise, wishing
the light or my hands' heat wave would melt the immutable snow.
I stare through the glass an inch away pressed
against the window, like the mother calling to her child.
If only she could unglue her mouth
from the glass, where her breath sticks, like frost on the pane.
If only the sound could leave her mouth the way
a locomotive shoots from a mountain tunnel,
then the order of their silence would break with my cry,
moving its bat-perfect sonar through the climate
of their sorrow.
Frozen in that lit interior, who will warn them when
the bad weather will begin?
Who will bring the child in?