13 Ways of Looking Out the Window
window cantos (pt I)
TL; DR: window as diamond, eye, iphone, spy…
I
The city, seen faceted:
Tho flat, and flawed,
The window, a diamond.
II
On my smart phone, astronauts
Rocket to a red planet.
Outside the window, two geese
Fly through a condo valley.
III
A thin brick of black glass that, with a tap,
Transforms into a tiny window,
Documenting, through a locked window,
Two floors down, two women.
They sing and laugh and,
On grey cement, tap dance
While twirling their umbrellas in torrential rain,
The downpour’s roar turned into a purr
By their song’s refrain.
IV
Below one thousand watching windows
The only moving things
Were sideways the eyes of the illicit smoker
V
30 feet below and a 100 away,
A white beachball
Pushed by a gust on the wavy asphalt
Coasts to a stop.
On its front, a blue iris
Islands a black pupil;
Up the eye telescopes me,
(Behind the window)
Down i microscope it.
Ahh… eventually,
With the wind it sails again along the street,
But here i stay,
30 feet above and a 100 away.
VI
Two transparent sides,
Solitary window, pane;
The man in the skirt.
VII
The best window is the one you never see,
As if hard air, it lets the sun through with ease,
But stops the sharp snow and the soft bees,
And construction dust, and the airborne disease,
And the vapors of diapers, beer, diesel and pee,
(As the garbage truck heaves up the bins).
The best one is the window you never see,
It lets the starlight through with ease,
But censors the midnight shouts from the couple below
(As she tears out his hair with such gusto),
And stops the pops of the 3 a.m. guns,
And dopplered police helicopter thrums,
And the hourly toll of the ambulance sirens.
NOTES:
-Camera flow from the studio looking out: ⬆️,↙️,⬇️,↘️,⤵️,↩️
-smoker’s eyes really to the side, geese really on street, beachball real event… etc.
-I recently came across “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. Its multiplicity of perspectives from a single subject matched perfectly The Window’s intent, thus the homage (including the Capitalization and punctuation).
-Then wrestling with the word “toll” (over "peal”) I looked up “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, and this quote from the John Donne musing also sums up The Window (each of the hundreds of individual photos all part of one massive work): “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”. So, some Window continents, or the city, shown faceted:
