Through Two Windows

Comforting, in its way, how, wherever you may be,

The effect’s so much the same--walking in Rome,

say, or Reykjavik, or one of those rust-red

Missouri rivertowns where we all were born and grew,

you merely glance right up into somebody’s home,

catching the sky, out back, through two

sets of windows, and are in a sense home free:

free of everywhere you’ve lived, everything you’ve read.

It’s a tinted sky--as if by the lives bound like a book

between its panes--and so not quite the one

you’re standing under. No wonder, then, these odd un-

sorted feelings of exclusion and remorse . . .

all a small price to pay for any look

at the roof of another world, of course.