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Link Details for: | FROM A WINDOW |
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| Link ID# | 139 |
| Link URL | http:// |
| Submited By | DAVID BATE |
| Added On | Thu_Sep_16__2004 |
Description:
FROM A WINDOW Between two stones that grind by night, between two hammers that pound by night - - the cold flat face of an old iron anvil - - I awakened to sirens screaming in the dark a dream of a dream within a dream. I looked from a window and saw you sitting alone in a tavern, waiting perhaps for the fabled Godot, some Queen of Dreams, a Prince of Peace or the Son of God while I danced with mannequins in the red-velvet, multi-mirrored alien discotheque next door. From another window I glanced and noticed that the late afternoon sun shown a warm gold on your shoe-less feet, as you walked to the Fountain of Mirrors by a river of glass to cast your wishes and precious medallions into the riffling waters, filling phosphorescent Pools of Fate. Gazing through yet a different window, I saw you solitary in Venice, naked and feeding birds at a far edge of the square. There were tears in your eyes… I knew you sensed the coming of winter with its warning of incoming gray - - clouds sandwiched as slate diagonal across leaden skies, summer’s warm laughter so soon to be gone. Went sailing, but the sea was too rough, had to turn back and I was startled then, to see you standing in a gondola passing as if in movie camera ‘slow-motion’ from under the Bridge Of Sighs. It wasn’t your face but I knew it was you. None of your disguises could hide that knowing look in your eyes. I cried out to watch your step, lest you lose your footing and slip down into some bottomless void. Fatigued, I slept for a month in the expansive emptiness of Idaho by a campfire that never burned out fire which I built on a barren plain that resembled a landscape view of Jupiter, Mars or the Plain Of Jars. You had said you’d be away in England but a messenger told me later - - during a dream…deep within lost warrens of the nightmares - - that you were really in France. In midnight desperation, I boarded a great ocean liner and knew you were on it. The corridors I walked in search of your room were narrow and long, dank, compressed and stifling chambers of seemingly thousands of doors. Claustrophobia came in nauseating waves like sickening and fevered psychic tides until finally I found you: surprised…with a shy smile but some how you knew I would come. Even then, you suddenly vanished with only a faint ‘rustling’ when momentarily I turned away to brush aside subtle glisten of tear and gaze through a porthole. I see your face sometimes in surreal shadows lightning flashes there and within those moments of eerie blitzkriegs raining down the blue-white light, a portrait hidden away is illumined and shown as framed in a dreamlike hallway of time… a remembrance of your lost child smile. From a window looking out into the past, I watch as a Salvation Army Band plays “Old King Cole” and crystal carafes of fine wine glisten deep red in prisms cast by firelight - - time seemed to pause and we laughed. Though unknown, it was really farewell. I looked for you on winter’s deserted beaches with platoons of gulls standing motionless and one-legged upon glistening sands, awaiting the end of a day. Noticed you once in a Lincoln at a high plains gas station, staring through the driver’s side window. I made a racing U-turn but you disappeared in shimmering heat waves like liquid air rising it was just an August mirage. I searched for you in the marble halls of a silent observatory with its giant telescope aimed up at a starless sky. Then gazing through the great lens, I thought perhaps to catch a glimpse of you floating through interstellar space or standing in Heaven amidst the glorious presence of God. I looked for you in the gray room among piles of clichés the millions of slogans…all so useless in heaps dangling conversations of the empty and trite tape recorder mouths set firmly in expressionless faces of ashen dolls…playing ‘figures of speech’ over, and over…without end the eerie gestures of the once familiar turned to strangers now I knew you were passing through - - your footprints lay on the floor in the dust and your fingerprints still clung to golden ceiling mirrors which like a vampire’s image, reflected nothing at all. In the blink of an eye, I caught a peripheral flash of your shadow as you left in a whirlwind without a goodbye. I fled the gray room with its lifeless, pale watercolors: the very air thick as cement and all the vacant people having in silence…each one…turned to stone the shattered music having fallen in a billion glassine shards the rows upon rows of petrified songbirds utterly unable to sing phantom zombie choirs with their empty faces and hollow eyes multiple groaning…clanking escalators which climbed up and down to nowhere and a grim smothering fog that blocked out the sun. Then out in the lonely night there was jasmine vaporous and intoxicating in the warm damp air. I heard haunting sounds of a distant train upon its tracks, no doubt making some journey to parts unknown perhaps a big city in the east, a great plains ghost town or maybe even down hill, to the center of the Earth. Feeling a sudden chill, I went to sleep under a half moon hanging as if hung from a lamp-stand by a lagoon we once knew: those nights so alive then with the music of frogs and haunting sounds of owls in the woods nearby. An hour before dawn, I awoke to the cawing of crows mysteriously awakened and restless in the trees. Standing up, I began somehow moving rapidly forward and passed through a thick, heavy ‘wall of time’ which offered no resistance and then stepped into a raging hurricane. The atmosphere cracked and fell in pieces like horizontal rain, driven by howling winds with dreadful force clocks, calendars, faces and years flew past me. Ten thousand sunsets and as many sunrises whirled round in a staggering blur, I put on my old uniform and looked from a window no more. David Bate ( a.k.a. David Lee ) Long Beach, Ca. September 10, 2001 . REV. Jan 6, 2002, July 30-31, 2002, and August 30, 2002 |
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