A Window to Me, Parts 1-3

A Window To Me

I.
I imagine, if you looked from where you are,
You could find me in a blue room,
Sitting one elbow on a mahogany desk
And holding a black ink pen, a ripped paper before me.

The azure carpet is littered with remainders:
A white suit to wear tomorrow,
A grey book whose pages long to be caressed,
And a small white note, telling me to phone home.

My sister’s paintings hang on the painted wall:
One with a silhouetted man confined to an autumn canvas,
The other of a girl standing before a dark mirror,
Seeing she isn’t beautiful, but a marsh grass green.

But you can’t know everything, only gazing in.
My floral bed sheets smell of burnt sugar and other failures;
the round clock resting above the doorway
continues to sound it’s haunting tick-tock.

I can’t see you, but I know you’re watching me;
This fog sneaking closer must be your breath.
The tapping on the rooftop; is it you, or the rain?
The blurred pane is as cold as the taciturn moon.

My eyes are drooping like a day-lily dying in the night,
and yet I want to open the door and meet you outside.
I’m tired but I must know more about this place;
I must know: am I finally home?

II.
My desk is always with me,
but still I sit straighter in a fold-out chair
and I am writing by the light of a brass desk lamp,
a captured moon, placed in my own night.
Can you see all of this?
Good. Keep looking.

My side is to you, so perhaps you did not notice
my right eye sagging, struggling to sleep.
When I think of you watching, the pen pauses on the page.
But I must write.
My deepest shadow slips through my fingers
and stains the white page.
I am cleaning it up.

Imagine you can see from the moon glow
the tapping of my feet.
They want to carry me over to the window
so I can close off these Venetian blinds.
This is the part of me wanting to hide from you
the approaching final lines.

You can see nothing else in my room
except the thin yellow outline of the light beyond my door.
I know you are waiting for something to happen,
thus I push back my chair, stand up, and walk over to you.
Our eyes are meeting this moment in quiet glass.
All I stand for is to break this silence.
“You think you know me,” I say,
“Well, who am I?”

III.
Even if you can’t see through the shadows
that drape across my room in wrinkled shapes,
I know the placement of every dark shoe and sweater.

Every necessity is within my reach.
The room’s darkness expands in the absence of light,
so tell me what you see, looking through this dark glass.

I can hide in this evening cloak
where dreams wait to surround my bedside
and entertain the black muses of the black moon.

Perhaps you wonder what I’m hiding from:
it’s a long night ahead of us;
there is an outside, where I control nothing.

The crawling darkness of the night was never my friend.
If you come to the door and knock, I may open up
and we can sit, talking by the light of candles.

But beyond these walls, we have no distinctive face
Silhouettes are strangers to be held in doubt.
Forgive me for my fears.

There are creatures lurking, this night.
Who knows what bears are prowling,
or readers, standing at my window?

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So I was thinking to myself - as long as I'm posting old poetry, I might as well pick out an old poem every now and again to show and to think about. This one always makes me think because it's as much to me as it is to you. Part of the inspiration for this poem comes from Billy Collins' poem "Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal". I didn't mean for this to be a three part poem - more like I wrote the poem 3 times on separate occasions because I kept feeling it. Often I take moments in time and expound on them, but here I create moments. Anyway, I really enjoy this poem and I hope you do too.