she sits upon a windowsill- (work in process)

She sits upon on a windowsill

and spies a laughing boy, about eleven,

walking barefoot down the river’s edge

beneath the tree’s green reaching hands.

The canopy throws its color down

and lights the shadows with reflections,

the subtle ocher, umber, rose

and violet rustle over every edge and

surface, every fractal point and pinion.

The locomotion of the whole

shebang, the cosmic engine, mindless

machine, turning, banking, sliding

through a water drop caught within a

blade of grass curled between two fingers:

he sees all this, and the running river,

lets the whole thing go, all those colors

running back to multiverse, to trees and leaves,

reflections, shadows, rock and stone

and cloud and water. She watches

from her windowsill. She snaps her fingers.

Lo, the wind comes. The low moaning wind,

the whistling wind, the shrieking wind. Her edgy

banshee sisters back from night, oblivion,

plastic trash bags in their hair, construction debris, dust

of old mornings, whistling and moaning

from the walls and props and underpinnings of the world.

Not even the winds look down from below,

where no bottom is, where no there is, where

there are just the thrice damned, shrieking,

and the sucking sounds, the lurching, the hideous foreknowing…

…and you wanted to write a simple poem,

about a boy and a girl beside the river…