Palaces of Glass and Stone and Stalheim, and: Stalheim

Chihuly in Jerusalem

Palaces of Glass and Stone

Though a man she's loved for fifty years is illshe doesn't say I love you. Anyway he knows.

They call each other Sweetheart and My dear.She talks about the spaces in the skies

beyond her windows where the towers were,tells him I could predecease you. He laughs.

She's bought a pack of photographs of glassset next to crenellated walls and under cypresses

in the Holy City where she's never been, formscurved like horns of rams in Bible-tales,

like water-droplets just before they fall. Colorsto compel an unbeliever: translucent green

of foam-slashed seas, blurts and streaksand blotches: smears of pigment stilled

on disks and bottles, all spilledfrom the vast shining. A wild excess

of feeling moving through has left its breathin edges pink as clematis or vulva, orbs

like ornament in liturgies, a blue so paleher mouth fills up with water. Stacked cubes

the green and white of glaciers, huesnever found in nature: tinctures of titanium

and zinc tint plumes like pollen-bearing grasses,rounds of cobalt rolled to rest against stones

beneath permanent skies. She wants to give himsomething, as if color were a gift of time. Glass

drawn bright from furnaces, spun and cooled,fixes and goes solid. Iridescent opaque blue, ice-white,

sun-red. Everything that ever happened there liesin the stones and textures sand: argument, belief

and slaughter, though everyone they happened tohas gone. She and the man were salt and grit

common chemicals and water, the flux and fritof the subjunctive going on, impure and importuning.

Stalheim

Midsummer. Fifty years after the war,following a tour-guide's gesture, I find myself

in a World War II bunker: HereNorwegian sentries watched for Germans.

Wind roughens tough wild grasses,occasional bird-call. Inside the stone vault,

curved cool goldwhite chamber lit by sunfrom somewhere, I look through a fist-sized hole

in the stone onto the entire miles-wide valley:Twelve blues, Norwegians say. Rocky outcrops,

stunted birch and maple. Spruce stunnedby wind, and scrub all the way to the river

at the bottom of the Stalheimskleiven,deepest gorge in Europe. A Jew in peacetime,

I remembered icy nightsin moonlight. No one could see me.