The Glazier

     by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky

All through the Depression he worked in the barn,
surrounded by glass shards from panes he sanded
and pressed into wooden frames for neighbors
who brought him their broken things.

His thick-gloved fingers scraped putty into grooves,
carefully fit sharp edges into place,
then brushed the wood with lead paint to let dry
near the boiler—a furnace on the barn’s gravel floor

we were too afraid to start up, after buying the house
on the same quarter-acre sixty years later,
the realtor’s chatter distracting us from cracked plaster, uneven floors.
One night a nameless stray who lived in the loft

slid through a tear in our bedroom’s screened door—
our legs sprawled, sheets shoved away for the heat—
and lunged onto my husband’s thigh,
kneaded her claws into his skin.

In my half-dream I moaned, thinking an alien
creature was howling through our open window.
She dug claws in deeper, and he yowled,
tried to push her off as she nimbly leapt down, scrambled out.

​

We couldn’t stop laughing, didn’t sleep for the rest of the night
but talked until dawn when lilacs wafted through the screen
on a morning breeze, and our dog nudged to be let out
to the yard of our first garden, freshly planted rose bushes,

maple trees that would shade the swing set and the barn.
The stray slept in the loft for years until one winter she disappeared.
We rattled the food bag in snow, called the name we gave her,
returned to the bedroom, finally knowing what we had lost.

I still find glints poking through soil
hard-packed by a century of footsteps.
Sometimes I think I see him too, beneath rafters,
cutting and beveling to feel transparent weight in his hands.

​

​

​