Before the Glass Breaks

The glass breaks near the end.

I know this because I still hear it

while standing years earlier

in the kitchen,

watching my mother rinse strawberries

beneath cold water.

She is younger than I remember.

The bowl is blue.

No -

the bowl breaks later.

You are beside the window already leaving.

Your coat smells like rain that has not started yet.

I ask where you’re going

after the door closes.

In another year,

the hospital corridor hums softly at 3 a.m.

Someone wheels past flowers

that have already died at home.

I haven’t learned your name yet.

I am still pretending not to love you.

The train arrives late

because of what happened in winter.

The winter comes afterward.

Snow enters beneath the apartment door

in a thin white line.

The radiator clicks.

You sleep facing the wall

we have not painted yet.

Earlier,

the paint is still wet on my hands.

I ruin two shirts trying to fix it.

The phone rings three times

before my father answers from a decade ago.

I can hear television static,

ice in a glass,

someone laughing in another room

before they stop forever.

There is a dog somewhere in this.

A black one.

It runs across the road

just before the accident,

except the accident has already happened,

except no one was hurt,

except that depends on where the poem is standing.

I find the photograph in summer.

The photograph burns in November.

Smoke curls upward

through a ceiling not built yet.

You say:

"We should have left earlier."

But we haven’t arrived.

The strawberries remain unfinished in the sink.

Water continues running

through three different years.

A child cries in the grocery store.

A monitor flatlines quietly.

The blue bowl slips from someone’s hands.

This is the sound I keep reaching.

Not grief exactly.

Not memory.

Just impact,

moving backward.

At the end,

which comes near the beginning,

the glass finally breaks.

My mother looks up.

You open the door.

Snow enters the room.

And somewhere,

long before any of it,

I am still standing perfectly still,

waiting for the noise.