The poem she posted on my birthday said more than she had
said to me in a week, talking about the place she lived in, the windows through
which the wind blew – the scents of shared suppers and the coffee the morning
after.
Her poem painted her neighborhood, the sound of Latino music
and wail of fire sirens (describing the ripped firemen as well.) She talked
about her lazy cats and her collection of books, and her selected collection of
possessions, this space serving somehow as protection and to fill the gaps in
her sometimes-disordered life.
Cloud 9 was her refuge, where she waited out moments in
limbo, where she had cried into her pillow and somehow found the resources to
maintain herself, a place where she had been healed, haunted, and (her heart)
abducted, collecting lovers, friends, exfriends, stalkers she invited into her
life and then shook off, selected people who come and go, but ultimately leave.
All of these people briefly pause to admire the view from
her windows just as I had, before leaving and eventually forget it all, and by
implication, forget her.
This poem explored this space as a space in which she might share
with others, while struggling to fulfill her aspirations as she watches other
people’s lives pass by.
Her word play implies much such as her use of “sextuplet
window pains” to suggest love making, and her personification of the windows as
perhaps symbolic of the people who have passed through her life, and the sense
of alienation and potential for affirmation they could bring “if only…”
This is a brilliant and complicated analogy in which a few
brief words imply some of the intense emotional moments that took place there,
the pleas for empathy, the screaming, even the crying done in public when as
she points out might have been better off done by themselves.
Having been there, I can imagine such scenes, the men and
women spilling their guts out, the lovers who came and went and who eventually
left permanently.
While this place with six windows served as a retreat, she
also indicated it felt sometimes like a jail cell, depending on “our” state of
mind, using the plural, and as the poem ends on a cliché, what a home really
is.
The poem has a tone of sadness and regret, but not despair.
In some ways, it seems nostalgic for somethings that ought to have been, those late-night
dinners that ended up with morning coffee yet did not eventually work out.
She clearly selects those who come there, and since the poem
comes in the midst of our turmoil, I can’t help but feel as if I am one of
those who came and went, and in the end remain unwelcome, one of those she “shook
off,” while she remains.
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