The Glass Between
He watches the world through the specific glass
of a man who has grown too comfortable to pass
through the membrane of the window into weather —
the glass between is glass forever.
The street outside has all its usual participants,
the commerce of the ordinary and the ambulants
of purpose moving through the frame like film —
and the man behind the glass absorbs the film.
The glass between the man and the world he left outside,
the glass between the person and the place he used to reside —
not a wall, not a barrier, just the thinnest of the thin —
but the glass between is where the man gave in.
He used to be among them, used to populate the frame,
used to move with the directional and carry his own weight
through the crowd with the assumption of belonging —
now he’s on this side, observing, and not longing.
Not longing is the key distinction — longing would imply
a want that runs against the glass, a reason to get by —
but the glass is comfortable, the glass is warm and clear,
and he’s learned to call the watching from behind it being here.
She used to pull him through the glass by the hand,
by the need she had for him on the other side, the planned
outings and the dinners and the social calendar —
all the things that kept him among them, the reminder.
Without the pulling he has settled to the viewing,
the passive spectatorship of everything still doing
itself without him in the frame of the window —
the film plays on past the edge of the window.
The things he might have pushed through the glass for —
ambition and connection and the wanting-something-more —
lost their pressure gradually, the way a tire loses air,
not a blowout but a softening until the rim is there.
The rim is what he’s running on, the metal on the road —
functional and forward in the way a rim can hold
a car above the pavement for a while, with enough
friction and momentum and the management of rough.
He doesn’t press his face against it,
doesn’t fog it with his breath,
the glass between the man and the life he hasn’t left
officially, just in the way that matters to the self —
the glass keeps everything exactly on its shelf.
The people on the far side of the glass can’t see the glass —
they see a window and they see a man who watches from the mass
of the inside, and they don’t distinguish between presence and the view
—
the glass between is invisible to everyone but who
lives behind it, who has learned the management of distance,
who has made a life of observation and resistance
to the gravity of out there and the pull of in among —
the glass between, the glass between, the quietest of the sung.
In the glass his reflection is a man who looks complete —
the reflection doesn’t show the glass,
the glass is its own conceit —
and the man who watches from behind it looks from the outside like a man
who is simply at his window, following his plan.
He has been at this window for a number of the years —
he knows its scratches and its streaks, its seasonal frontiers,
the way the cold collects upon it in the mornings of the deep —
the glass between the man and the world he chose to keep
at a distance, at the managed and the comfortable arm’s length,
the glass between as preservation and as strength —
the glass between the man and the world is his design,
and the man behind the glass is doing fine.