ATTIC WINDOW

It's a third-floor attic room with a single dormer
flooded with that rich north-facing light artists crave.
The old casement windows are thickly smooth with green paint
layers deep, except where water and wear have exposed
the fine-grained oak frames, gray and stained.
The glass is ancient, rippled and bubble-filled
like sheets of clear candy hardened on marble
in the kitchen below, where the wood-stove still serves
the needs of egg-rich breads, kolaches and kuchen.

Back again, after these many years, she looks to the north,
toward where the river turns its brown August current
beneath willows and cottonwoods, scouring the sandstone bank
to silt the downstream bends, the fields it floods in spring.

Beneath yellowed cottonwoods her brother hung himself, years ago,
on a Sunday morning, after he dropped the pass
that would have won the homecoming game
and mad the autumn less bleak, less silent.
Her father cut him down, carefully, cradled his sandy head
like a newborn's in his farmer's arms, weeping softly
as the stream bore to the south its bourne of bubbles and silt,
then laid him on the bank, crossed the limp arms,
and went to fetch doctor and wagon, priest and sheriff,
and to speak words for which there are no words
to the only soulmate who would hear and understand.

When he died next year, in the fierce unyielding teeth
of the farm machinery, it was on the same stretch,
the soft earth undercut by the unfeeling river,
so that tractor and swather alike tilted and rolled
in a dream-like slow arc, over and over on him.

The windows are open; a slow humid breeze circles
and sighs as she rests her cheek on the old pane.
When the rain comes, warm and windless,
she feels the windows stream with the melting sky,
with tears from without or within, and watches
the blurring and waving of the summer trees
take the faithless river from her sight.

Reprinted with permission

from A Step in the Dark

Copyright ©

by Stephen C. Behrendt