The Window

By Michael Yost

No glass is pure
Or vacant of a scene.
My window shows
A robin’s red and knows
The sky, serene,
Blue, broad, and sure.

Glass is not still,
But dapples, sways our sight
Of lead limbed tree,
It’s panes not blank, nor free,
But quick with light;
Light’s note and trill.

So sacral glass
Admits the infinite
And moving blaze
Which burgeons in all days;
Becomes, in it,
The light, just as

The light becomes
The color, shaped and stained:
Bemattered spirit,
And we, in vision, near it.
Yet what is gained?
All light succumbs.

Light’s waves lapse still,
Its particles dispersed;
Or else it hides
Behind the titan sides
Of Earth, immersed
In night’s old chill.

Yet instant stands
Experience’s shape
Before the mind,
Truth’s body now divined;
Her breast and nape,
Her limbs and hands.

But memory
Keeps no perfected vision;
The blinds are drawn,
The photograph is gone
In time’s quick scission;
The faces flee.

The life of things
Is known, at least, and seen,
In fragments, pieced
Together. What has ceased
To be has been,
Yet memory rings.

I hope the seed
Of images abused,
Unworshipped, shattered,
Now pollinated, scattered,
Will bloom, re-fused,
Our rose of need;

That rose which blooms
— Despite the subtle wars
Of mind and world —
In fire that’s jeweled and pearled
From heaven’s corridors
And lighted rooms.         

Michael Yost is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. He is earning his M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of St. Thomas in Houston Texas. His essays and poems have been published in places like The University Bookman, Dappled Things, Crisis Magazine, the St. Austin Review, The Brazen Head and Hearth and Field. Follow him on Substack here.