"Look, do you see?" It is how a guide might start, pointing at something in a gallery or shop window. Sasha Fenn's "Glass" takes the invitation back almost at once. The answer is "No. / Nothing." and the speaker adds, with a kind of flat honesty, "Nor can I." The guide has nothing to show and is as blind as the person being guided. From there the poem asks what we are looking at when we look at nothing, and why that nothing feels so heavy.
The first trick is the word "glass" itself. Glass is the one material whose job is to be unseen, so the speaker's logic is almost playful: "for glass is clear, / and there is nothing there." Transparency becomes proof of absence. But the poem keeps unsettling that logic. Is the glass a pane, perhaps one that once protected a "poster"? Or is it a drinking glass that has been drained? The poem never settles this, and the phrase "or the glass is empty" offers two explanations for the same blankness. The final section hints at a third meaning. A glass that is "empty" while "the time is short" and "the time is little" recalls an hourglass whose sand has run out. That reading is an inference, since the poem never mentions sand, but the pile-up of time words makes it hard to ignore.
Those time words are the heart of the poem's construction. After the plain, short opening, the second half becomes a list, each item introduced by the same phrase: "and the time is short, / and the time is near, / and the time is little, / and the time is impatient, / and the time is deaf, / and dumb." The repeated "and" makes the lines feel like a tightening noose, with no room to breathe between them. The adjectives also pull in two directions. "Short," "near" and "little" suggest urgency, a deadline closing in. "Impatient" gives time a temper. Then "deaf" and "dumb" strip it of any ability to listen or answer. Time hurries us, yet it cannot hear a plea or explain itself. The gap after "dumb," where the list stops for a full line of silence, lets that last word hang.
What follows, "and the time is a cloak," is the one metaphor in the sequence, and it is a strange one. A cloak covers and hides, so time may be what conceals the poster, wrapping the past out of sight. A cloak can also be worn, as though time were something we all move around in. The poem leaves both possibilities open.
The poster deserves its own look. Posters announce things: events, sales, faces. They point to a future date and then become outdated. A vanished poster is a promise whose moment has passed, which fits the poem's obsession with time. The poem never says what the poster showed, and that restraint is part of its effect, because we are left staring at the gap.
Formally, "Glass" is free verse with no rhyme scheme, and its vocabulary is mostly one-syllable words: "see," "there," "gone," "clear." Lines are short and end-stopped, so the poem moves in small, flat steps. Repetition does the work that rhyme usually does. "There is nothing there" echoes through the poem, and one pair of lines quietly reverses itself. Early on we read "The poster is gone, / or the glass is empty." Soon after it comes back as "The glass is empty, / and the poster is gone." The "or" has become an "and." Uncertainty has hardened into a double loss, and the speaker no longer needs to choose between explanations. The poem ends by repeating "the glass is empty" twice, circling back to where it began instead of moving forward.
That circling is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not describe emptiness from the outside. It makes the reader sit inside it, with a speaker who cannot help, an object that cannot show anything, and a clock-like voice that keeps counting. Its power lies in how little it gives us: a clear surface, a missing picture, and time passing with nothing to mark it.