Glass

 
There’s so much of the outside world
plastered to the warped glass,
it’s nearly impossible to see outside
the dilapidated trailer these days.

She can almost remember a time when
she would somewhat regularly
get up and wipe a moistened rag
across the slick, see-through surface.

That time seems almost mythical
in its unfathomable distance,
and it almost makes her want to laugh,
or maybe cry; they’re pretty much
the same thing in a place like this.

Not only can she not see out,
the world cannot come in,
and on many days, for that she’s grateful,
as she figures no one deserves to be privy
to all that her life has failed to become.

Her world is now the dusky haze
of a time that rejects time,
everything an insubstantial muted gray
culminating in nothing more
than the inevitable more nothing.

But on this today, in no perceivable way
different than all the other todays,
something pokes through just right,
and she fishes the moldering dishrag
from the plastic kitchen basin,
a relic from a distant time
when clean dishes were a part of life,

she gets the rag and wets the fraying fibers
and reconnects with a lost life
that has always been waiting there for her
on the other side of the glass.