Place in front of you two glass bowls, 18” deep, sturdy like fish bowls. One filled with marbles, cat’s eyes, aggies, clearies—smooth-round glass. The other filled with broken glass, small pieces, edges sharp enough to cut, every color imaginable, twisted this way and that.

Stand. Settle one hand in each bowl, fingertips touching bottom, glass up to your wrists.

Your hands are in two separate worlds, one edgy-sharp, one smooth-round. Your hands, front and back feel glass; one smooth-round glass caressing; one edgy-sharp glass tickling. Go slow. Feel your hands. Feel glass between your fingers, smooth on one hand, sharp the other; sway your palms about, sharp-edgy glass awakens, smooth-round glass comforts. Edge-cutting glass scratches one hand front-n-back; knubby-soft glass clunks the other. Then there’s the heel of your hand; have you thought about it lately? Or the Life Line slashed across your palm? Tumbly-smooth comfort or scratch-poke wince? Move on. Cuticles, smooth or ragged, are sensitive. Get daring. Focus on the middle-knuckle of each finger. You can do it. Round-marbles butt-up against wrinkles or sharp-edgy broken glass cuts knuckles. Move up toward the palms, hinge knuckles or down to the finger tips. Ahh, so many parts to your hand. To feel smoothround/sharpedged in bits; and all at once.

Then, there’s our grand opposable thumb—hold onto the world! Anthropologists (some anyway) say grasping the world kicked the brain into high gear. Who knows? What you know is that you can move one thumb through mounds of soft glass, round-knobby-smooth, hear the shift, gentle clackity-click; and the other thumb, well, edgy-sharp cutting right into your skin. Blood, a little, you’re not a cutter, you won’t bleed out. The shuffle, clump-n-clutter, shudder of glass is all. Each touch is different? Deep inside your skull you know you could swallow a fistful of smooth-glass marbles, choke. Or, pushing down hard, cut through skin entirely, open a vein. It’s not the point, don’t go there.  

Happily, both hands in rhythm now, one might be the diastole of the heart, the other will be the systole, relaxation and contraction, yes, even as you stand there on both feet, one hand in each bowl of glass, feel your beating heart. Quietly, feel two kinds of glass—your heartbeat, contract/relax/contract/relax sending blood to every cell, right down to the tips of your fingers. In glass. You may not have intended to sigh, or take a breath, but just now you might. While amazed by heart, blood, breath, and touch, you pause to imagine one bowl is prose: neat grammar, clauses, syntax galore; the other bowl is poetry with rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, often sharper, and, oh god, onomatopoeia. Skip along, churn both hands vigorously about, randomly scrunching left-n-right in each bowl. Hands touching glass. You are. To touch, the etymology at far root, is to ring a bell. Pull out your hands, let them float by your side. Ask quietly. Listen. What bells are ringing?