The Window

The window is long and narrow, the casement-sill a brooding lid way over my head. The glass is dirty, thick and knotted. It is not a window made to see through. Upstairs, high above the basement an old woman lives in an apartment with a high ceiling. Her windows are tall and wide, you can see out of them, a sea-green park billows below. I went there once with a note in my hands. The sky comes to visit those windows. People live in rooms too high for my imagining, but I know they dwell in the light. Ear to door, I hear them laughing together, clattering down the staircase. I listen closely to the first rap of their shoes on the pavement above my head. Their strides quickly become ghosts in a settling dark. Half a century later, I wake up on a cote-bed covered in night-sweats. The basement has not changed---it cannot change. The dark window is dreaming above me. Once a child lived in the dark I hear it talking in its sleep. The window is still too high to see through.