Two Poems: Window Seats; The Night’s Still Surface

Window Seats

For one full day and a portion of two,
we sat within that window seat watching

a catbird leap from willow branch to ground,
and back again, lost inside the netting

of newly-knotted buds.  The glass that made
the panes was warped in time’s slow rippling,

and scattered thin spring light across your room,
and the paperwhites near the wooden bowl,

and your mattress on the floor, and our limbs
knit in our talking, and in our silence.

But now each second is counted out
by the train as it rocks on its rails,

with only me in this window seat’s
reflection; and the muffled lights streak by,

above the gray, hunched forms of buildings,
toward the city, and the world’s forgetting.

 

The Night’s Still Surface

They bounce across the sofa,
to the ottoman, to the wingback chair—
back and forth before bedtime,
laughing at the crocodiles and sharks
that prowl the rug’s blue pile.

Scooped up, up stairs, read to in bed
to ease them into sleep inside
the soft fortress of quilts and pillows—
the ritual may fail some nights,
and they scuffle in on pajamaed feet,

dragging blankets and the awful weight
of grown-up fears and precocious grief,
and I have no spell, even now,
to banish what may break through
the night’s still surface.

And there we sleep, huddled on my bed,
adrift and waiting for the dawn
to spill across the wave-worn cliffs
of dressers and shoals of laundry,
and turn that treacherous tide,

so we might pick our wary way
across the hardwood strand,
through the jetsam and the
clutter of morning.

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