The depth of thought & feeling in these Window Poems transform the notational style, and vice versa. They add up the way a Breughel does, each little scene intense and absorbing, yielding to its small place in the encompassing community. There’s hesitation, self-doubt, vulnerability, life-sizeness here, in and among blazing visions where everything is writ large. There’s an ear with perfect pitch, a lightness of touch, which makes for a voice deeply afraid of getting nailed, especially by its own anger and righteousness. In the corner of the forty-paned window at the Camp, feeding from a roofed flat, the nuthatches, chicadees, sparrows, bluejays, cardinals flew in and grabbed something up and flew off, and the poems did and keep doing likewise, hunting for what to trust. All taken together they sound like what they do, not what they say: the author is throwing the dice, the stakes are high: his long wrists are loose, he’s on a roll.

February 2003 Harrison Co, Kentucky

WINDOW POEMS

WINDOW. WINDOW.

The wind’s eye
to see into the wind.
The eye in its hollow
looking out
through the black frame
at the waves the wind
drives up the river,
whitecaps, a wild day,
the white sky
traveled by snow squalls,
the trees thrashing,
the corn blades driven,
quivering, straight out.

2.

The foliage has dropped
below the window’s grave edge,
baring the sky, the distant
hills, the branches,
the year’s greenness
gone down from the high
light where it so fairly
defied falling.

The country opens to the sky,
the eye purified among hard facts:
the black grid of the window,
the wood of trees branching
outward and outward
to the nervousness of twigs,
buds asleep in the air.

3.

The window has forty
panes, forty clarities
variously wrinkled, streaked
with dried rain, smudged,
dusted. The frame
is a black grid
beyond which the world
flings up the wild
graph of its growth,
tree branch, river,
slope of land,
the river passing
downward, the clouds blowing,
usually, from the west,
the opposite way.
The window is a form
of consciousness, pattern
of formed sense
through which to look
into the wild
that is a pattern too,
but dark and flowing,
bearing along the little
shapes of the mind
as the river bears
a sash of some blinded house.
This windy day
on one of the panes
a blown seed, caught
in cobweb, beats and beats.

4.

This is the wind’s eye,
Wendell’s window
dedicated to purposes
dark to him, a seeing into
days to come, the winds
of the days as they approach
and go by. He has come
mornings of four years
to be thoughtful here
while day and night
cold and heat
beat upon the world.
In the low room
within the weathers,
sitting at the window,
he has shed himself
at times, and been renewed.
The spark at his wrist
flickers and dies, flickers
and dies. The life in him
grows and subsides
and grows again
like the icicle throbbing
winter after winter
at a wrinkle in the eave,
flowing over itself
as it comes and goes,
fluid as a branch.

5.