Close as any embrace, we press together—
you on a ladder tipped against the house,
me, crouched inside the kitchen sink—
twelve mullioned panes within our grasp.
We wave at—in truth, against—each other,
in patterns the weathered casements circumscribe,
like all the other greetings and departures
they’ve witnessed, within their manageable squares.
Yet blurry gestures aren’t what we read,
nor what their insulated touch confers
as we settle on one unyielding spot,
but the grim opacity of grime, Windex,
and webs, streaked like ambiguity
between us. Oh, and you, of course, must scan
(a second time?) the random sheet from the morning
edition, wadded behind your clenching hand.
Whatever incident your side reports,
my own opposing view insists, “No Reason-
able Offer Will Be Refused,” illustrated
with a waterbed that grants untroubled sleep.
Finally, there’s tapping, a finger’s accusation,
a smudge someone must own. More smearing, mist
and scratching . . . until we see the fault, if it must
be someone’s, is the rain’s, acid-etched
like habit on the glass. Next comes the instant
when the eyes shift from the wiping hand, from the bled
and sodden news, to the bright unblemished glass,
bedazzled by the sudden reflection there:
the mulberry I should have let you fell,
the marble countertops you knew I’d stain.
Another glance replaces this, when the glass
conducts our gazes like incidents of light,
and our heads, tilting, doubting their eyes, perhaps,
survey the glints of sun. But that perfection
breaks, breaking as we say the sun breaks
among clouds, when the window allows the eye
to dissolve the glass and its little solipsisms,
and to see beyond it, as though our furious swipes
had been at nothing, at shade or at air, at some
foreseen inclemency, at something behind,
and not between us, where, now one face is framed
between the draperies we shouldn’t have bought,
and one, among the vines of unnamed ivies.
So satisfied, before the next set,
there is one other glance the eyes catch
—at least, my eye caught yours—when the cleansed window
permits a look that is, just as we start
our small descents, adoring, inside and out.
