Addictive day starts with the lit-up screen
against the backdropped window, while the street’s
still dark, the gray slate roofs oily with rain.
Distraction of four newspapers’ front pages
clicked on to spiral into distant windows
and distant, virtual and dulled encounter.
Better to go down to the café counter
(above which, on a television screen,
the same heads talk) and watch, beyond the windows
a drizzly morning’s intersecting streets
that used to open into day, their pages
etched with the calligraphy of rain.
One more fall day, whose uncertain rain
is the most probable, least vexed encounter.
From left to right, from right to left, on pages
or posters, paravent or movie screen,
spectators are the spectacle, when streets
unwind their bobbins below open windows.
Addicted, then transfixed behind the window’s
barrier, slant light, slant fall of rain,
a mystery enacted on the street’s
begrimed and glittery parquet will counter-
act the dire pronouncements you can’t screen
out, the bad news on the daily pages.
You write what someone wrote on other pages
when lives were flexed and fixed in different windows,
a nightstand’s pile of books enough to screen
out anguish. Morning whispers through fine rain.
Upstairs, on the blue-tiled kitchen counter,
the coffeemaker waits. Perhaps the street’s
doubling for the discovery of streets
paced briefly or long-viewed on midnight pages.
Elsewhere’s tired eyes, an elsewhere you encounter
lowering the shades, turning from the windows
to walk downstairs and veer into the rain,
thrust your borrowed double through the screen.
Out of the rain, a cup chinks on the counter;
out there, the street’s, and here, the morning’s pages
fold like a screen. Time to open the windows.