Rinse one and you’ll be rewarded with a winking lacery,
spherical gas masses:
globe balanced on ballooned globe,
floating fragilities,
each begging to inhabit the imagination.

Precise chambers with slanting walls come to a point
in the bottle’s depths.
Their curved roofs cling together, make
the structures definitive
as cut glass, insubstantial as castles in the air.

And these architectures shift, could be beings
poised like oursleves
on the edge of tremor. But they don’t have aspirations,
attitudes, passions,
don’t carry spiritual beliefs, a fear of death.

Soon they’ll collapse or explode in silence
and nothing will remain
but a bottle in the sink, a sill with a cracked tile,
darkening windows. Don’t
weep because you can’t re-create this weightless now .
Enter and exult in it.

– Myra Schneider

© 2014, poem, Myra Schneider, All rights reserved; excepted for Circling the Core and published here with the permission of the author