Out My Window

            I like to observe life in front of a window, in a coffee shop or sometimes a bus or train. The pane of glass blocks sound and makes me feel anonymous. I write most often in the morning at my kitchen table when my husband and son are sleeping or just after they’ve left for the day. I don’t like a wall in front of me, so I face the trees and bushes in my back yard, the humming birds and  occasional woodpecker, the ubiquitous doves.

           It’s easier to write about things that are removed by a pane of glass; someone I’m close to is more difficult. I won’t keep a bird inside, not even a gray parrot, so often any that I touch are dead or dying: the hummer in the cobwebs near my garage door or the sparrow lying on the rocks, its body speckled with ants, its eye still alive-looking.

            The address of this blog, silveredglass, comes from the process of making a mirror. When I drink from a silvered glass, what I taste reflects my own taste. When I look through the glass, what I see is a reflection of myself – my preferences and opinions, my passions.

            Here’s a poem I wrote about two years ago when I saw something of my inner world by looking out the window:

HOUSECLEANING

The ash tree’s name

matches its color

in the low light

before the morning’s trash collection.

January reveals in the tree’s branches

an old dove’s nest,

empty but too embedded            

for the ash to discard.

Last spring’s deciduous leaves hang

like disintegrating wall paper,

choked off not by diminished

autumn sun, but in a quick

frost that triggered the tree’s panic. 

Confused by the odd weather pattern,

the lowest branch hovering near

a heat-retaining rock has

an incongruous coat of green. 

The tree lives

in this room and doesn’t

bother dusting the others.

Someone needs to sweep out

those upper branches, just throw out

all that junk.  But the ash

remembers when each broken

leaf was a green bump,

when the birds were first sawing

with their egg teeth,

first signaling with open ruby

funnel mouths, first singing.