Fly Cycles II

Windows between humans
And our surroundings - in youth,
Offer only reality's portrayals

From my bedroom windows,
For years, I watched a world
Seemingly at peace in its enduring cycles

One window was open beyond thoughts,
That were layed upon pillows and muddled in dreams,
Another was open at my feet

Some nights a sterling moon peered,
In a wildly, fluorescent mischief,
Above the adjacent roof -
And was my companion

The biting outside and my room
Had fallen to night -
Though it seemed,
That when the frozen portrait
Refracted the petrified and lucent moon's streams,
It was only an eerie form of day

That is an image, eternally nostalgic
It inspired effortlessly and was magical then

In thaw, pink blossoms scrawled against window edges
The insides and outs of them - newly opened
And my room breathed again

I drank innocence in so many of those springs
And always tasted fear

In longer days the pinks would grey
And then obscure into the ordinary greens
Of leaves to be swept from our deck, unendingly

Then crickets screamed
On sweltering, sultry - lonely - nights
And my frustrated ears would receive their song
Only inadvertently (I knew) and -
By the default of all that was nocturnal
In my vignette

On some of those nights, there was relief -
A breeze frisked across the room
And cooled the fevered sweat
Of young night terrors and scenes

In time, a bolder wind came to squall
And the newly dead leaves
Began to stick to ceremoniously closing windows
With the ancient water that fell
And was caught, two stories above landfall,
To make adhesive

Rain then cooled into sleet
That tapped like the fingers of forbidden lovers
Against the exterior of the panorama
That appeared plastered, two dimensionally, on my window

And so, transparent paintings shielded me
From the unbearable and enticing elements
That were, beyond the experience of my childhood

The shield was stoic and unfeeling,
And I think now; fortunate
Though, I thought then; confining

And it was next, in calculated turn,
That a chilling silence would fall
In thick, heavy flakes -
Surely, torn scrupulously
From holiday wrapping paper
And sprinkled from the winter picture's overhead

The white and blue paper designs
(No two alike) adorned evergreens
And the reproduction of a jovial Christmas card
Could be seen, somehow caught, in my window,
Between the microscopic layers of clear

Every spring, without fail,
I yearned for something real,
Something raw and edgy and impious -
The brutal, primal side of New York seasons,
To help me cast aside the childish naiveté
That seemed then, to cling for far too long
Though I know now, it was lost far too soon

Yet, all along, there was some reality contained there
In my room, in my home -
Human turmoil, an actuality of the ideal
Is never exemplary -
When had between mortal windows and walls

But the window's portrayal, as I remember it now,
Is only of my childhood's
Vague and most organic surroundings
And that, was nothing less than picturesque

The brutalities of passage
Were there, in focus,
But nearest to me - inside my mural
Where I never thought to look

An existence in realism began immediately within,
Where the holes adorned my screens and
Trapped spring flies in summer months -
Where each one fought passionately every autumn,
And before winter -
Died, with admirable self-effacement, on my sill.