This Is My Version of Window
for Angela
It is a perfect
cool glass
square
in a bare wall.
It is what
I am looking through,
my transparent body afloat
in the middle
of a white garden
called a hospital bed
that sits behind me
where my husband sleeps,
post-operative and restless
in his viney tether of tubing.
It is night
and the Queensboro Bridge
stretches out this way and that
streaked by headlights,
blinking through us both
as time does,
turning us into shadows.
The Roosevelt Island Tram slides
away like the button on a switchblade.
This is the window where yesterday
the resident stood, framed by Botticellian blue,
to tell us the worst case scenario:
lymph nodes, cobalt, chemo, jawbone, teeth
and we gritted ours
like you do on a carnival ride
as it goes belly up.
I've never been to Roosevelt Island,
but I imagine it as limned in light
like the tram, a small bead of safety
and I am one of the tiny, tiny people
allowed to go there.
I can take no one else.
No bags, no personal items,
no one, not even my children.
This is our special square of hope
And it contained for me that night
all we can ever dream about islands.
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