99poems/smash

“You never really
see something,”
an artist said,
“until you break
it on purpose.”
A man who was
allowed to smash
his mother’s
cracked cups
in spring.
I have lived
this truth
a harder way,
breaking up
my life,
believing I am
getting it right,
always starting
again,
again.

He re-paints
his shop every
two weeks, he says,
a man who
follows his
obsessions
into art –
“the discarded,
the forgotten.”

His grandmother
came to visit in spring,
and threw the damaged
cups against
the garden wall,
as a way
to get rid of winter.

5/26/99