The Window / Nine Attempts
1.
I have returned to this
glass over miles
and through light
and time
the smell of dust
the body’s salt
to tell you:
It still holds
the bones
of the swallow.
2.
It’s true I have watched one red skiff drift
reckless on the blue
toward open water.
Have stood and marked the derelict moment
when distance won out over sight, the red skiff
lost now to the blue. True that skiff is a word
that suggests insignificance
which does not absolve me
of anything — not of caring more for seeing
than what’s seen
nor my thirst for silence
which has formed
a pane of glass in me.
A form to study light with. A genuine rescue.
3.
You said, notice what you’re noticing. You said, ask yourself
what do I think about this, what do I think about that,
all day long, ask yourself, what do I think.
I think there are days when the window lets in more sound than light.
I think I am at the window because it matters
what things are — river, wing-bone, girder, sill,
that bird once named the young of any kind
but does no longer. I think the window
is where time, in thinning light,
pours off the world like rain
off the eaves. Where I annotate
the days, the earth’s tilt
and spin, not a world of objects but a world of events.
I think we all might slip
away if this is true. I notice I am standing here naming
the hours and qualities of light
until the light fails.
4.
I think at the window,
night expiring.
The thousandth shade of blue
light easterly. Death of
one moth, dust of its wing
on my fingertip not dissimilar
to the dust on the sill
I trace through saying wrist. I think
time and light keep happening
and happening. I think I see
ink-dark and shining
from the wing of one bird
one feather shed
on the walk
likely a primary,
[that is, for flight]
numbered from
innermost to
outermost in keeping
with the molt pattern
wing with a notch
to augment lift
no longer. Forgive me
I think
the elegy
I stipulate
in this case is vestige
meaning trace of a word
of unknown origin.
No, mutable —
the cascading
derivatives of which refer
to the act of giving.
And taking.
5.
Or, to put it another way, here I am at the window again
where I have spent all day trying
to name the light. The light
which, like the stone, is granular. Where I have said
it tumbles, seeps through, have hauled
these words in my arms over time and arid miles
only to set them down on the one line
that can hold them.
The line which, like light, is said to break.
Is said to be slant in certain hours.
6.
Then all day it shifts and lengthens, pools and stops short, pours itself out,
ripples like water over shoals,
like your fingertip
tracing down my keel.
I mean breastbone.
Lash and glower, billow and drift.
Next the light pulls and thickens — bands of mournful color at dusk
as if wounded by its own
diminishment. Then the dark seeps in,
the hours from all sides. I think
this is what I meant when I said: You are the night, deep and mineral,
not ungentle. When I said:
I am the body, hand on the wall, feeling my way through.
7.
I think the window happens
in the lisp of time and light.
Holds the separate consolations of the falling.
The searing night.
Tell me, is there a word for.
Is it time yet to.
I think the window happens
between shelter and glare
so that we can touch both
at the same time.
Here, where we are glass.
Annealed. Mended
but barely.
8.
I think I see the swallows singing
along the arched prayer
of flight. If not a world of objects, how does light
gild the very edge
of one wing? I notice the glass, reticent.
I think: Its distances
are thronging
in us. The scuffed horizon,
blue axiom
of longing.
The red skiff.
The red skiff
beyond sight. It is late
and I am not here
for half-measures,
nor to make amends.
9.
But which
window?
/ / / / /
Notes:
“The Window| Nine Attempts”: In section two, “A form to study light with. A genuine rescue.” is a reference to Robert Frost’s explanation of form in art: “What are the ideals of form for if we aren’t going to be made to fear them? All our ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued.” In section three, “not a world of objects but a world of events” is from Carlos Rovelli’s Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity.
Front page & contractor note photo credit: Focal Point Studios