the blue window

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blue window

That longing you have to be invisible,
transparent as glass, thin air
that is what moves you certain times to tears
watching the evening fill with city lights
and the long dusty summer avenues
rise weightless through the air and
tremble like constellations in a sky so
deep and clear you are your one desire,
Oh, let me be that blue…



And in another moment you would stream out the window and into the sky like
a breath —
but it is almost too dark to see. In the next apartment
a door is flung open. Someone speaks someone's name.



from: Katha Pollitt, Blue Window

 

 

 

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blue window again

Blue Window of Lippovan House, Danube Delta

Ready yourself, soul,

it’s late, oh, it’s late!

The rainbow of bells,

the rainbow of bells

drinks our blood’s last pulse,

all our peace from the River.

A rainbow of bells: the evening

presses white soles to the window,

the water flows clouded,

the water flows clouded,

from I am to I shall have been.

from Realm, by Nichita Danilov, 

tr. Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Cîrstea

about Danilov:

The poet "belongs to the Lippovan Slavic minority, a group which settled in Moldavia and the Danube delta in the eighteenth century, having fled Russian persecution after the Orthodox Church schism. Although Danilov was raised speaking both Russian and Romanian, he writes solely in the latter language.

The Lippovan identity as religious dissenters has been instrumental in constructing Danilov’s own identity. His mystical vision of religious experience seems to inform all his poems, even those that do not contain explicitly religious imagery. The imagery itself can be located in the Romanian engagement with Surrealism, which has provided Danilov a mode for describing an ineffable God. In his poetry and theoretical writings, he argues that the divine is manifest in this world through surrealistic moments, that is, through jarring juxtapositions."

by Sean Cotter, who translated a volume of Danilov's poetry into english.

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blue is not always serene

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,

rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head

propped on 'The Meaning of Meaning'.

He catwalks down our corridor.

Azure day

makes my agonized blue window bleaker.

Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.

Absence! My heart grows tense

as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.

(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

from Waking in the Blue, by Robert Lowell

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blue window

A pretty word, window.
Window: the wingbeat of the yellow butterfly.
Two carelessly painted wooden shutters open out,
clumsy blue window.
I jump in and out of you, ride you like a horse,
my foot dragging the ground.
Window on the open world, from where I saw
Anita, expecting, get married, Pedro Cisterna’s
mother urinating in the rain, from where I saw
my love arrive on a bicycle and say to my father:
I have only the best intentions regarding your daughter.
O wooden-latched window, child’s play for thieves,
peephole on my soul,
I look into my heart.

Window, by Adélia Prado

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