Interpretation of cullet

What Fire Remembers

The Poet What does this sound like when it sings?

Sand did not ask to become transparent. Fire decided.

What you see through is the scar of what burned away.

Glass holds. Glass holds. Glass holds. Glass doesn’t.

No middle. No bending. Just the sound of certainty discovering its limit.

The glassmaker’s word: cullet.

Meaning: this was a window once. Meaning: less heat this time. Meaning: the material remembers how to be unmade.

Noise is the interval between one frame and the next. You hear everything. Everything is nothing useful.

But the nothing is not empty. It is glass-to-be, waiting for someone to bring the furnace.

Fire is alive attention. Without it, shards. With it, the next window —

smaller panes this time, lead between them, each piece its own color and thickness, each bubble a kept flaw.

Glass breaks. That’s not the tragedy.

Glass that can’t break stopped being glass.