The Basement Cellar
The window is long and narrow,
the casement-sill a brooding lid far overhead.
The glass is dirty, thick, and warped.
It is not a window made to see through.
People live in higher rooms; they dwell in the light,
they clatter down the staircase,
their shoes tap and thud on the pavement above.
Footsteps fade into a settling dusk.
Half a century later, a frightened child
awakes on a filthy cot.
The boy is trapped inside a man, an old man
covered in night-sweats.
The remembered basement has not changed,
it cannot change,
time hangs like a broken clock there.
The murky window is even now blind and dreaming.
The dream talks to itself,
it is obscure, possibly displaced
so long buried as it is under its own darkness.
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