Jody's Notes
So this is true. I came of age in a transitional period. (But all periods, I think, are transitional in one way or another.) Anyway, marbles were still given to children--me, for example. By adults as gifts.
(They weren't worried about us swallowing them yet; they weren't yet worried about being sued for being bad parents.)
So maybe as little as five years before I'd become marble-worthy, children used to play outside (in Brooklyn) with marbles. All sorts of games. But nobody did that anymore. (And the adults apparently didn't know; nobody had told them.) So here I was being given these beautiful little objects, and I didn't have any idea what I was supposed to do with them, how I was supposed to play with them.
Art of a sort, I guess, that's what the adults had inadvertently given me. Because these little spheres were gorgeous. And, of course, I did like collecting marbles and staring at them.
(And there was what was then called "Chinese Checkers." But somehow marbles transcended that game. Somehow, marbles--what they looked like--transcended every game I ever knew how to play with them.)
Traditionally their shape impresses,
but I didn’t notice it.
Nor did the opaque ones interest me
despite the press mystery gets.
Instead I loved the sterile flowers,
the clouds never spent in precipitation,
and the cat’s eyes that no animal ever used
to see prey.
I don’t know what I was thinking of
When I threw one against the concrete.
The stickyfingered autopsy revealed
only broken glass, some of it colored.
The magic isn’t in the form but the substance.
I knew this only after I saw a prism splinter
dull light, my face trapped in glass
behind a mirror, and Christmas tree lights
twinkling like neurons chatting.
I haven’t entirely lost touch
with the miniature worlds.
For example, I always watch the eyes
when I’m bargaining. I play pool, visit
fortunetellers regularly, guard the family jewels,
and yes, play the occasional game of Jacks
with the kids.
Keep everything in perspective, I always say.
But then again, there are those mornings
when I look in the mirror and my face splinters
as if Picasso is God. Then I think of statues,
and the hard tears they sometimes shed.
© 1988, 2001 Jody Azzouni