At the altar

The windows of the glassmaking factories were blown with stones, asbestos flaked the edges of the air – the touch of atmospheric chemistry.

The altar’s arches had collapsed into the road and its cemetery was dead while the woman in the unmarked grocery was spider-webbed with dust.

I pulled the beaded curtains to the sky. Look at the crumbling chimneys forming at the edges of my eyes like sleep! Even the wind was a shade of grey.

There were once the Gauls who taught the monks who taught the Jews the art of shaping molten quartz. A way of seeing – through things.

But I could only stay a moment. The nearby motorway cut a two-mile hole in the Napoleonic mountainside. The Roman road was grazed by sheep.

This is the way to the sea, they say; the past which cut the present, future footprints smeared on unblown glass.

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