The Glassblower's Hour

At midnight the furnace keeps its small red animal, and he feeds it the way you feed a grief— slowly, with both hands, not looking away. The breath goes down the pipe like a rumor and comes back wearing the shape of a vase.

He turns the rod the way the earth turns, unhurried, certain no one is watching the rotation. Heat slides off the bulb in honeyed sheets. For a moment the glass is neither liquid nor still— only a verb the hand has not finished saying.

What he makes will cool into something brittle, will hold flowers, then water, then dust, then nothing, will catch a window's worth of afternoon and let it go again, indifferent as weather. He knows this. He blows anyway.

When dawn comes the shop is full of held light, each shape a held breath someone walked away from. He sweeps the floor of its bright failures— the cracked, the lopsided, the too-eager— and starts the small red animal once more.