Because I’m often standing, not left behind or going but deciding, 
            at the window. Over there,
a woman waves her cloth across the glass that she is cleaning—something
            in the view of me not writing 
but imploding with the weight of my desiring.

And who am I but someone standing at a window needing cleaning? 
            A picture floats above the scene, 
appearing in the words that I am writing with a wish for love and 
            meaning to embrace the space between. 

The woman in the window keeps moving, her sweater red and unrelenting, 
            but the circles she’s creating 
are consuming what is red and what is now beneath her waving disappearing. 
            She turns away from what is now 
conspiring to become someone else’s hope or pleasure.

My cat is still complaining about what I didn’t open. She’s biting corners 
            of the shelving and the books—
her way of choosing not to paw but gnaw. She is calling out the nouns of eating. 
            Here’s the bird, the feather floating 
from the open jaw of loving. She’s not caring for the meaning but depends 
            upon my bending to her will. 

In the shower, I am warming everything that’s cold—my hands, my feet, and
            last night’s dreaming. Outside the warm,
the world is waiting to be written—the future passing into the past, 
            and the past is always incomplete.