ROBERT ROTHMAN - POEMS

Robert Rothman lives in Northern California, near extensive trails and open space, with the Pacific Ocean over the hill. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Tampa Review, Willow Review, and over seventy-five other literary journals in the United States, Canada, Wales, and Ireland. Please see his website (www.robertrothmanpoet.com) for more information about him and his work.

 

TEMPERED GLASS TO THE BREAKING
​

​You can throw a rock against tempered glass
                                    and it won’t shatter into fragments,
                        explode,
                                                sending a fusillade of razor-sharp shards
            outward.
 
Heated to a hellish temperature
                                    in a sea of fiery furnace,
                        the outer surface, quenched in short blasts
                                                of glacial air,
            hardens.
 
The inner layer,
                                    slower to cool,
                        tries to pull away from such sangfroid
                                                in unbearable tension:
            the glass congeals.
 
When the blow comes,
                                    hurled with all the force available,
                        slung as a slingshot,
                                                catapulted to devastate,
            aimed at the weakest point
 
The glass shivers into silvery veins,
                                     spreading out like nerve fibers,
                        scattering to the far reaches
                                                until they can go no
            further.
 
In the aftermath of words leveled like gunshot, the ground
                                    still reverberating with the spent violence, you walk
                        splintered into ten thousand pieces,
                                                held together
            by something you don’t understand.

IOU
​

I O U, I do.
 
An acronym in full.
 
But who are U? And if
 
O is owe is it an o like obligation or o in own?
 
Or o in zero or nothing, which is nowhere
 
And everywhere. Debt, to my bow,
 
Misses the bull’s-eye, which is round
 
And O-shaped. If I O U who is
 
Unknown and always now, I arrow
 
Gratitude, though it has not a single
 
O, but which I grok as oozing with
 
O-ness, which is Oneness; which
 
Looks with both its eyes outward
 
So the small center is found in a
 
Larger circle infinitely expanding.
 
I am tingling—gratis--
 
Which is a near cousin, as is
 
Grace, the beautiful shy one.

FUGU AND LOVE AT A JAPANESE BAR
​

​Sheathed in all red
Like a brilliant tropical fish
Swimming in aqueous air, she said
 
To me, a perfect stranger: “I wouldn’t wed
A man who doesn’t court danger
Sheathed in all red;
 
Fugu, like love, should be fed
To the discerning, who
Swimming in aqueous air is not led
 
By silvery skin and fluttering gills to a flounder’s bed,
Covered in pimpled coral,
Sheathed in all red.
 
Fugu is Dante going to the land of the dead
And returning, swollen lips subsiding,
Swimming in the aqueous air. If you bled
 
My heart like a fish deprived of defense, spread
Me on a platter whose border is
Sheathed in all red,
I’d swim through the aqueous air: a steelhead.”