At the window

This poem is a little more serious than most of my stuff.
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At the Window


"... And found concealed imaginings. "
Wallace Stevens' "Peter Quince at the Clavier"

At the apartment complex
on a cool spring day,
I sat in the sandbox with my young son,
watching the window--
the second floor window, third from the left,
open as it was, with the dark wind
blowing the drapery about like a tornado.
Inside the room
I could just make out the forms
of two people locked in the movements
of passion, a motion
unmistakable to anyone
who sat, close and still, and watched
how they moved, how they paced themselves
delaying in their tender nerves
the climax that worked its slow way up
their spines and on to the calcinated & domed
bundle of nerve endings and grey tissue: the brain
whose purpose is (they used to say) to cool the hot
and fetid humours of the body.

Not that it ever does, of course;
a cold shower works much better for this purpose--
the brain is actually quite irregular and unsuited
for the purpose of calming the passions or
restraining the lusty impulses of flesh.

The movement of the wind on the drapery
manipulated the folds as if they were alive,
and behind the folded cloth, the shadows
in the dim light moved with a secret knowledge
accompanied by the movement of the drapes
like the Chorus of an ancient tragedy in Greece
or like the final, fatal kiss of Anthony & his Cleopatra
upon the stage of some long-lost Globe
burned and reduced to ashes, along with the rest
of London in the plague and fire of 1666.

Patience is its own reward,
and in the late, declining hours of dusk
as the light dims and the clouds radiate a sheen
of reds and purples, streaking the skies in keen anticipation
of the storm that was to come, had already come
and gone in some far distant land,
in that precise moment when the skies felt
the movements cease in the room
the winds dropped, and the curtains fell still.

I watched then, with even greater interest,
as the single form moved to the window.

He stood there for a few moments,
long enough to light a cigarette,
turn briefly to his lover and point a finger
to the darkening clouds on the horizon.
Of the other form, I saw only a familiar curve--
and the steps in the background as one moves in
the semi-darkness to their toilet.

I don't remember what else happened that day
except I picked up our son and moved
to the back door of the townhouse at
Apple Hill, grateful for the wind and the
sense of ending to it all that we now shared,
however brief.

And in the darkness of the night
with the storm coming hard upon us--
with lighting and hail and heavy rains--
you climbed into bed beside me and held me
as if you had never left.

And I loved you so much that I pretended to sleep
when you got up in the night, went to the window,
and stared out, with quiet longing, into the darkness beyond.