Monday
The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.
They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of
earth-
the Chinese poets looking up at the
moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of
sunrise.
The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their
windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe
is involved.
The proofreaders are playing the
ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to
page,
the chefs are dicing celery and
potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday
afternoon.
Which window it hardly seems to
matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see-
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlight of a taxi rounding a
corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling
across the street.
The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and
chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb
knocked down by the wind.
By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the
dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.
Just think-
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a
jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to
stare at.
And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped
wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.
I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman's heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her
poet-lover.
—Billy Collins
(I, too, am at my window—out which, these days, there is a borrowed apricot orchard.)
image: Albert Marquet - Fenetre ouverte sur la baie. Seven Arts Friends
