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A Bowl of Oranges
Or maybe it’s actually the moon that you’re seeing in that bowl on the railing, just now rising above its rim. They call it the harvest moon—so huge that it hovers over the entire town—which occurs because, when the moon is just at the horizon, it’s subject to something known as “the moon illusion”—and it’s just that, an illusion—the thing’s really just the size of an orange, and so now, undeluded, there they are again—the oranges—back under the tree and scattered across the yard.
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But the Shadow
A person walks into her shadow, but the shadow always wins. This is an observation made at night from an upper window looking down on a quiet street; each person who passes must walk below a row of streetlights, each of which, in turn, recalibrates her shadow, beginning by casting it behind her and then arcing it in slow degrees until it is directly above, and then casting it on beyond until it finally reaches the light pool of the next streetlamp, and so on, shadowing the person who has no idea how hard it’s working to keep her under its protection.
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Recipes for Glass
Take something that will vitrify—take a grain of sand, for instance—and try to see through it. Take a grain of sand and try to melt it. Melt it. Then add something to flux it, which is to say, lower its melting temperature. Melt more of it. Melt a whole lake of it, and then, on impulse, throw in a form of calcium oxide—lime, for instance—which will freeze it, and there you’ll have it—a perfect lake of perfect glass, and all the rivers running into it will turn to glass as well, inciting a vitrification that will ricochet all the way back up to their sources, springs from which glass will flow directly into windows.
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The Thimble
We see it first on a green hillside against which it’s the merest glint, sun-lit, a thought sun-pricked—suggesting that every sun is a missed stitch—meaning that constellations are actually glitched samplers—minimalist, meticulous, and gone all wrong, the product of fingers pricked in off-moments, nicked just when thinking of something else, the mind on wander, which accounts for the seemingly random nature of the stars in the night sky. If these needle-pricks had ever taken on decorative or informative patterns, no one would have ever invented the thimble.
At times, a thimble waxes historical, each one a chapel, apse and onward, a little bit farther—for instance, this one is down a long lane lined with overhanging trees, ancient trees of a particularly ancient green, deeply infused with an ancient grey at the ancient end of which a thimble particularly gleams.
There’s a thimble down at the harbor, all its attention on the horizon, with tiny sails reflected in its every dimple. Every thimble secretly yearns for the sea, secretly dreams of being afloat and of that rocking motion, which must be extreme in the case of such a light vessel. And yet one can’t imagine its sinking—I mean, think of it, can you imagine a thimble sinking in the sea? Neither can it—it doesn’t give the danger a second thought but thinks instead of the breeze and the salt and how the salt will sparkle in the sun when it’s dried on its rim.
Or is it that the thimble, still down at the harbor, all its attention on the horizon, is thinking that every thimble has lost a traveler somewhere in its tapestry, its ancestry, or its adamancy, and of how many have set out on uncertain seas unreasonably bent on their recovery.
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Initially
There was a first time that a human being looked out a window, lost a stitch in breath, caught what’s left and held it aloft—I saw, I said, that a window is where you lose yourself, making it a wilderness, and there it is—wild in its caress.
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Shape
A window is merely a shape for the sun. One. Sun came in a window, and the window took form. This is how the window was invented. A stray ray, and glass occurred, found its chemical nature, just a framework—the sun always needs new frames, and so we have houses just so that they can have walls just so that they can be pierced by windows just so that the sun can have ever more elegant stagings—it’s the ultimate painting, which must, by definition, overflow—must be the sun in its raging, defying all framing.
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Cole Swensen is the author of twenty books of poetry, most recently Veer (Alice James Books, 2026). A a former Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, she has been a finalist for the Griffin Prize, the National Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award and was awarded the 2025 Paul Engle Prize by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. She has also translated 30 volumes from French and has won the PEN USA Award in Translation, the 2024 ALTA National Translation Prize, and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize. She divides her time between France and California.