Title: Glass Bubbles
Medium: Photo
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Money must once have seemed
innocent, original,
a miracle mined and minted.
Men thought (some thought)
that gold ripened underground,
responding to a generous, piercing
influence of the sun.

No numismatist myself,
the shimmer of these enticed me
to blink over their display case,
conning the profiles that so
commandingly adorn their discs.
A score of our stodgy Miss
Liberties have tried
and failed to emulate them:
Athena, Alexander,
helmed gods and men,
heroic heads the race
in its youth relied on.

But what, I wonder, put it
into my head to wonder
which of the little, dimmer ones
was the obolus, the smaller-
than-bite-sized coin the bereaved
put under the tongue of a corpse
to pay the Ferryman?
Failure to pay meant a hundred years’
walk in the thorny woods.

Later, alone on a cool
marble bench in the lobby,
I held a dime to my lips
and tasted nothing more than a faint
flavor of use and abuse.
Children, of course, are always
swallowing coins, which seems less
silly somehow than tasting them.
I took my dime out of my mouth
and myself out of that museum,
onto a street where the August sun
poured forth an argosy.

To be born, to be brought up on earth
is so untold a good fortune,
it is like found money,
stumbled on every day.
What we conceive as our last
destination is our own business.
Let each man look to his own,
I say to quiet my heart
that would have me blurting out
what few of my friends believe:
We go where Love would have us go,
the ferrying there is free.

Museum Coins by Robert B. Shaw

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Glass Blowing Wiki

man-made glass first occurs in Mesopotamia

Glass Art Society

The American Scientific Glassblowers Society

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