The Window

Streak of world blurred charcoal & scarlet, the El slows,

brakes near the platform, Little Chinatown,

& there’s that window, peeling frame, screen split

to rippling raingusts. A curtain breathes

through busted glass, a glimpse of hallway

enameled green, rows of numbered doors, nothing more,

and then the train lurches forward sparkling

its electric signature above slick, hissing rails.

Soon, soon, I’ll stop there, the window’s pull

irresistible as the force of a star collapsed

to black gravity. I’ll step through the window,

take up again the key for the one room to which

I keep returning. Let me wait again there by the sill

as I wait still. Here’s the steeple of the burnt church,

beloved of vandals, the sooty block of

old law tenements where chipped tubs rise

porcelain on their feet in coldwater kitchens,

unashamed, small gray animals, the startled

array of insects we lived with.

Where are you? In the hallways, bodies passing

smell like bodies, unwashed, ginsoaked, dopesick,

the musk & salt. Where are you?

Hear with me the slant beat of that orthopedic shoe

striking pavement a few stained facades away.

With each echoing step, feel again the raw acceleration,

hope, or is it fear looming, receding?

Streaming hellmouths in the asphalt. If each of us

contains, within, humankind’s totality, each possibility

then I have been so fractured, so multiple & dazzling

stepping toward myself through the room where

the New Year’s dragon lies in its camphored sleep.

In the days I lived here, a thousand rooms

like it, making love was a way of saying yes,

I am here, these are my borders, hold me down

a little while. Make me real to myself. One more shining

thing gone after in the night that disappeared

with morning. No substance. But I’d like you

to place your hands, cradling the neck’s swanny

arch, stand here by the copper dormer window

that’s like an endless gallery of such windows

with fire escapes burdened by doves’ insatiable

mourning. Then let it happen, the desire to be out

in the world, more than in it, wholly of it,

trammeled, broken to neoned figments.

All it takes is a few adjustments—

purple those lids, the lips as we did then,

that old mirror clouded with vague continents. We’re

ready to inhabit the sequined gowns, martini glasses

the hair, and then the wig. I could never face anything

without the wig. Transformed, the old vaudeville desire

struts & kicks its satiny legs, the desire to be

consumed by ruined marquees, these last drifting hotels,

to be riven, served up singing, arched & prismed

from a thousand damp boulevards. Those things which shine

in the night, but what vertigo to surrender, falling

through the elaborate winged buildings they only have

in neighborhoods like this anymore, January’s bitten snow

cold about the ankles. Let me move again, a wraith,

past these windows – bridesmaids’ gowns the color

of casket linings, flammable, green

as gasoline poured from the can to flame the alley

outside the Welfare’s fluorescent offices,

police stations, the shabby public hospital’s endless

waiting rooms. How exactly pinned-to-the-wall

love was in that harsh economy, the world, the world, the world.

What I remember is the astringent sting of air.

Living on nothing but injections & vodka, a little

sugar. The self, multiple, dazzling. What I remember

are the coral husks of lobsters broken clean

through restaurant windows, steaming. Through these

windows tumble fragments, the stories, lavish

vertical fountains of opera. Dressed as death’s-heads,

crowds demonstrate against the new war

with placards before the marble stairs. Like a wraith

let me move among them, through the rooms

of this building, home of my fondest nightmares, let me

stay the hand twisting in rage, let me crush

the white & violet petals of sleep, the black sticky heart

of sleep over the delicate eyelids, over the bodies’

soft geographies, over the sorrow, the grandeur

of columns & esplanades, the soot-shouldered graces

outside the museum. Rude armfuls of orchids

fill the florist’s windows, these lunar ones

curved like music staffs above dissolving aspirins

& you will meet me there, the world rosegray beyond

the scalloped tops of buildings & we shall seek

that thing which shines & doth so much torment us.