Glass House

They learned to build by building, walls all glass,
with doors that roll on marbles, looking out
on all the green a body could take in,
a cluster of glass houses left as if
left not to be left, full of their old lives.
A child's bed on a lower level keeps
a paper Chinese kite and a blue dress.
This house begins to blend into the land,
its skylight broken by a branch, the grain
of the diftwood railing rotted out,
the few books waterstained and yellowing.
I come by moonlight, aping my own ghost,
the moist air and the white light on my skin,
as if, outside myself, I might look in,
a mystified light center of my self,
to be drawn through a shiny needle's eye,
this house of glass through which the world must pass.

"Glass House" first appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review