The Window I Wish
for my niece Xondra
A window draped with night
like a road in rain reflects
my face, two passing taillights.
The pane is cold and hard and smooth
as polished stone.
Touch stains the glass.
At three a.m. abandoned streets
draw every destination close.
Pain pills. Alcohol. Cocaine.
The coroner’s report was clear.
From an alley view,
what could he know of you?
But the dead are made of what the living write.
No life can be rebuilt
from words we never say.
Maybe a better craftsman
will someday raise a house for you
with a wide window on an avenue:
a window to show you, hold you
arriving home, headlights blazing,
country wailing on the radio—
maybe Patsy; maybe Walkin’, I Fall, Crazy—
maybe with time to listen,
time for a last cigarette.
You inhale…eyes spark.
Sigh…they close against the smoke.
See the high-ceilinged living room?
The richly upholstered easy chair,
a desk for correspondence,
a lamp waiting, always alight?
And reflections. Can you see us
rewritten, reframed—maybe forgiven—
there, both sides of night?
Memento Amore
The Historic Davenport Hotel, Spokane
Captured, she eludes us.
Farthest foreground in a chair half-turned
from the long table the young woman sits farthest
from the bride, hands in her lap, back straight as if
holding her breath. She alone among the guests
looks away, refusing to return our gaze.
Repolished marble floors. Ceilings repainted
and regilded. Photographs on the mezzanine
reframed, rehung. We’d stop there overnight
that long year of your mother’s dying.
The Peacock Lounge. Beneath a hundred
stained glass eyes, blue-green-yellow feathers,
we’re sitting in a booth recounting countless hurts.
Pain she suffered and inflicted.
Yet there were mornings when it felt enough
just to wake beside you and take in shared rhythms
of our breathing, behind closed eyelids certain
dawn was restoring corners to our room.
Black, white. The only words the camera had
to render her lavish gown, her woven hair. Glass cast
and colored for sightless eyes, wings never spread.
On an unyielding pane our faces faltering, fragmented.
And your mother never changes.
But midnight footsteps in the empty lobby.
Laughter unrepentant from an upper room.
Cigarettes unfurling, glowing endings flying
past windows that still opened. Was I half-
remembering or half-dreaming then?
A lens, I hope, before the shutter.
A renumbered door for new numbered days.
Memory, love, set free.
The photograph: A Wedding Banquet in the Hall of the Doges, 1909.