Helsinki Window

for Anselm Hollo Go out into brightened space out there the fainter yellowish place it makes for eye to enter out to greyed penumbra all the way to thoughtful searching sight of all beyond that solid red both brick and seeming metal roof or higher black beyond the genial slope I look at daily house top on my own way up to heaven. * Same roof, light’s gone down back of it, behind the crying end of day, “I need something to do,” it’s been again those other things, what’s out there, sodden edge of sea’s bay, city’s graveyard, park deserted, flattened aspect, leaves gone colored fall to sidewalk, street, the end of all these days but still this regal light. * Trees stripped, rather shed of leaves, the black solid trunks up to fibrous mesh of smaller branches, it is weather’s window, weather’s particular echo, here as if this place had been once, now vacant, a door that had had hinges swung in air’s peculiar emptiness, greyed, slumped elsewhere, asphalt blank of sidewalks, line of linearly absolute black metal fence. * Old sky freshened with cloud bulk slides over frame of window the shadings of softened greys a light of air up out of this dense high structured enclosure of buildings top or pushed up flat of bricked roof frame I love I love the safety of small world this door frame back of me the panes of simple glass yet airy up sweep of birch trees sit in flat below all designation declaration here as clouds move so simply away. * Windows now lit close out the upper dark the night’s a face three eyes far fainter than the day all faced with light inside the room makes eye re- flective see the common world as one again no outside coming in no more than walls and post- card pictures place faces across that cautious dark the tree no longer seen more than black edge close branches somehow still between. * He was at the edge of this reflective echo the words blown back in air a bubble of suddenly apparent person who walked to sit down by the familiar brook and thought about his fading life all “fading life” in tremulous airy perspect saw it hover in the surface of that moving darkness at the edge of sun’s passing water’s sudden depth his own hands’ knotted surface the sounding in himself of some other. * One forty five afternoon red car parked left hand side of street no distinguishing feature still wet day a bicycle across the way a green door- way with arched upper window a backyard edge of back wall to enclosed alley low down small windows and two other cars green and blue parked too and miles and more miles still to go. * This early still sunless morning when a chair’s creak translates to cat’s cry a blackness still out the window might be apparent night when the house still sleeping behind me seems a bag of immense empty silence and I feel the children still breathing still shifting their dreams an enigma will soon arrive here and the loved one centers all in her heavy sleeping arm out the leg pushed down bedclothes this body unseen un- known placed out there in night I can feel all about me still sitting in this small spare pool of light watching the letters the words try to speak. * Classic emptiness it sits out there edge of hierarchic roof top it marks with acid fine edge of apparent difference it is there here here that sky so up and out and where it wants to be no birds no other thing can for a moment distract it be beyond its simple space.