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Two Poems About Windows
Naked Old Man Speed-Walks to Get
Kitchen Counter Between Him and Window
On days off I wake up as late as I can
and wander into the kitchen bare-assed naked.
There’s a big round window there,
and outside maybe neighbors
to be scandalized. We had
a tree in front of it. The tree got sick
of seeing me, got removed,
so, tired of telling me to put on pants,
my wife sprayed decorative “snow” stuff
on the lower part of the window
(after all, a rectangular shade looks stupid
over a circular window),
then told me to walk back and forth
in front of the window (with weenie wagging)
while she went out to the front yard
to see what could be seen.
Not much could be seen (but there’s
not much to be seen, you’ve seen it all
before folks, hell, half of you have one).
“But won’t fake snowflakes look odd
when summer comes?” “We’ll think
of something else by then.” I guess
I could wear pants, but I keep expecting
to go right back to bed (and almost never do—
so much to do, so few days off, naked
man eats eggs, naked man washes dishes,
sits down at computer, crosses his legs,
lounging at the TV…).
Maybe we can PAINT pants on my bare
bottom. People would be confused enough
to see what they WANT to see.
By next summer I’ll be 70, and no one
wants to see a naked old man,
though my naked old woman
is kind enough not to tell me.
Looking Out, Looking In
Out the window, half a cloud,
a piece of tree, bits of gray—call it sky—
In the dusk little more dimension than
an old brown academic painting in bad lighting.
Any hint that somewhere half the sun sets
while a ghostly crescent of moon rises—any hint
is fugitive, impossible to distinguish from knowing
these things must be so.
This pane-patterned square is framed by a room,
walls, chairs, papers, TV… what we call
a life, looming large in lamplight to stave off
any ghost of other largeness in which we are absent,
all outdoors (barely visible through my reflection)
reduced to an almost still-life in the window’s frame,
perhaps leaves wobbling in a wind I cannot feel,
even the window a lie: vind auga—Old Icelandic
for “wind eye,” eye of an old icy wind,
an opening thru which a gust, a guest, entered,
now a fake—a glass eye, through which the wind
cannot see us.
In the window, that glowing square on a dark boxy shape,
surrounded by the world of wind and cloud
I stand in, head bared to the moon,
my vision framed only by the eye’s limits, if even that
when, as now, drawn out by the night sky’s depth
where the clouds open, I slip out of my head,
still seeing, by what means I cannot say. Looking in,
I see a man at the window—
I think of my father, but he is dead,
and of coming home late to a house in another city,
but this neither is nor was my house,
nor the wind’s, and yet that glow promises
an inward depth as deep as the dark between stars,
something to do with home.
I see the man as he lowers a shade,
then only a crack of light, then none,
and I am both outside and inside at once,
more penetrating than the wind
that licks my eyes and tears them.
I am the wind’s eye. GOOD wind! GOOD boy!
Come home with me, wind.
by Dean Blehert |
