Briefly she sees "life is terrible."

Looking out she wants the window to be

lyrical about snow, dreamy for Hitchcock,

cold cash, hot property, anything.

But, it's "wet and cold with instrumentation,"

Fountains tinkle in the distance.

She might say something

like "then, the thaw."

The smell of warm butter,

seven dollars, purple velour.

Wonderful dream!

This darkness is an apiary.

She risks saying it.

Her melancholy a fenestra,

moth's wing or transparent sting.

____

This was inspired by a combination of Barbara Guest (her new Forces of Imagination is fantastic) and, predicatably, Rear Window. I'm always interested in qualities of attention, and the ways that poems make wonderful, strange sense of particularly women's minds, musings, experiences of impostorship. (Incidentally, I knew nothing about "Housemaid's knee" until this week when I spent five hours scrubbing the 19th century apartment I recently vacated!)