What the Glass Holds

The window keeps nothing — only the color of afternoon pressed briefly against its surface, then gone into dusk.

My grandmother's hands moved like that. Flour settling on the counter, the slow fold of dough, a shape remembered by the air long after she left the room.

I have tried to hold certain lights — the way a city looks from a bridge at rain, the exact pitch of someone laughing in a corridor I can no longer find.

But holding is not the right word. Water doesn't hold the stone it smooths. The stone just becomes what the river taught it to be.

So I stop trying. Let the afternoon pass through me like it passes through glass — changed on the other side, and bright.