What He Said

A Poem by Geoffrey Brock

This is what you must do, he said: look past
this glass, not at it. Not at the ghost face
that lives in here and haunts you with your gaze
when you are gone, that glass-eyed twin you’ve glimpsed
each day since you’ve known how to look, but past
and through that guy, and at that realm out there
(fixed in a sun’s warm beam, a moon’s cool stare),
which may be made of leaves, or snow, or grass,

which now is—look!—the home of him whose pug
just loosed a stream of pee on your parched lawn,
and of that hawk on high, and of that child
perched in the oak next door, a warm blue egg
in her brown hand—and which is yours on loan,
its due-date blurred, and which you call the world.

---

---

The Dream Window in the Old Liselund Castle, Georg Achen, 1903

---