Window Poems: St. James Street
For Charlie
1.
a woman sitting at a desk
framed by a rectangle of light
looks through a rectangle of dusk
that sections off a tree, the curb,
two cars, a brick house across the way lit
by smaller rectangles, one of which frames
a fragment of room in which I sit
watching her as she writes.
Writing her as she watches.
2.
I don't like getting dressed
in unnatural light,
and so fight the city this way,
leaving curtains open
as if all that's out there
are woods.
But I do turn my back to the glass,
move quick as a rabbit for cover,
mindful of the keen eyed fox
who might be up for
feasting on my privacy.
3.
After all, who can resist
the lure of a big pink blur,
clearly naked
and swimming in ripples
behind stippled glass?
You are caught as you lean on the counter.
You feel like an ass,
but wait for the coffee and watch,
the window an awful TV set,
mesmerized by this fat man's toilette
that seems to go on for hours.
You blush as he reddens and gawks
and scrapes at his flesh,
the mirror scissoring out,
to make him even bigger
to himself than he already is,
which seems an impossibility.
At last you manage to tear yourself away
Just as he goes on safari in his nostrils,
Cavernous in the early light,
the gleam of his clippers
snapping you upright.
4.
I clean mildew from the frames and sills.
Red, it is, like kelp
grown in a tiny ocean of window sweat:
product of the dance going on near the glass
when heat wraps itself around
the insistent thrust of each cold draft.
Then I bring this knowledge to you.
as snow blows wild outside,
salty and warm in the dance we do,
awash in a gray tide of light.
5.
Two months we've watched the man next door
go across the street and through the gate
wondering what he was up to.
Dreamed him in one of those gardens
tucked like a beautiful secret behind the houserow
full of the bliss of vegetables in need of tending,
and a bower of pale pink roses.
Something we were hankering for
as spring crept over everything.
Him with his rusty knees and swollen feet
wobbling over to Paradise day after day
while we were trapped in this brick box.
That's what I wished he would say
instead of what he did when I finally asked:
Why, it's my neighbor.
She's eighty-five
and a widow,
lived here thirty years
Her husband was my mate.
She doesn't get out much any more, poor dear,
so I bring her groceries and fix her a cup of tea.
It's the least I can do.
And pray that someone some day
sees their way clear
to do such things for me.
6.
I watch the girl
in the garden flat below us
brick up her flower beds
to keep the cats out
while my hands imagine touching that damp earth
now choked, compressed, unable to yield
to the feel of skin, or be stirred awake
by the midwife sun.
Tomorrow I'll build a memorial:
several purple pansies on the sill
in a long white plastic box.
7.
The tree in the front,
caught plain leafed now,
and jaded as a weed,
belies its former life
as a blushing girl
looking up at her first beau.
All her pink snow,
loosed on the sill by late May gusts,
now long ago swept
into bins,
a bit bruised,
and hauled away.
Soon we'll haul our suitcases
down the steps,
And into a cab.
I watch for it out the window
Even though I want to stay.
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