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Blue Window
by Ann Fisher-Wirth
In that shadowy time before sorrow—
that twilight, October in Berkeley, the early 60’s,
when I walked home along Euclid from Mrs. Runkle’s
where I’d played Schumann’s “Traumerei”
so beautifully, for once, I’d made her cry—
Before the missile crisis, when I sat on the bed in fear and exaltation
and thought of Anne Frank—while on the TV downstairs,
Soviet ships inched closer to Cuba—and wondered,
when they come to get me, when I hide beneath my desk,
my head in my hands, and the walls shake,
will I have told the world
how I love this life I am forced to lose?
Before Christian, my neighbor, drank developing fluid
and his death at Alta Bates took 48 hours, the poison dissolving his
stomach,
and his father the beautiful philanderer told my mother,
“The divorce caused it,” just failing to add, wringing
his elegant crooked fingers, “He did it for grief of me”—
before Ronnie, my neighbor, took acid and flew out a window,
and Jackie, my neighbor, drove 90 miles an hour into a stone wall
at prep school in Massachusetts, and Kwaasi, my neighbor,
talked to God and carved his arms and died at Napa,
the boys who lived around me lost, all dead by nineteen—
and before I had ever bled yet, ever got high, or
loved a boy, or played at kisses through Kleenex with Mary Lou—
In that time before my father lay in bed
all one year’s end, the vast flower of his death blossoming,
and wrote, in a tiny crabbed hand, in the datebook I found years later,
“Had to increase the dosage today. Ann and Jink allowance”—
in that Christian Science household no one spoke,
to this day no one has ever said to me, “It was brain cancer,”
but last winter my husband got drunk in his rare blind fury,
ran weeping into the room and pounded the bed over and over,
shouting, “Don’t you understand yet?
In the war they treated men for lice with lindane,
poured it over their heads,
they did it to your father, and now the fuckers tell us
lindane eats your brain.” –In that time, that twilight,
when I walked slowly home along Euclid,
how I wanted to belong to the family I saw
through the blue, wisteria-covered window, to be their girl,
enter their garlicky dinnertime kitchen,
later, to sit on a high attic bed, legs crossed tailor-fashion,
and pick dreamily at white chenille—
I wondered, why not be anyone, go anywhere?
when light dies around the oak leaves
and white, ragged moths come out to beat against the streetlight,
why not knock at the door and say “I am yours. I am here”?
“Blue Window” first appeared in Feminist Studies and is published in
Blue Window (Archer Books, 2003).