She Sits Upon a Windowsill

tower-of-love: Painting and Poetry by Rick Mobbs

She sits upon a windowsill

She sits upon a windowsill
and spies a laughing boy, about eleven,
walking barefoot by the water’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
rustles over every edge and surface,
every fractal point and pinion.
The locomotion of the whole shebang,
the cosmic engine, mind machine
turning banking, sliding through
a water droplet caught within
a blade of grass curled between
two fingers. He sees all this
and more, there beside the running
river flowing like a dream thru
his attention. His attention is a moving
thing, like he is, and he’s a roving, freckled,
happy sunburn, loopy, careless
and so fetching.

She watches from
her windowsill and notes the romp
and listens to the forest talk,
the chittering of birds and squirrels,
the sounds of things that root and snuffle.
She notes the hiding place of perch and trout,
beefy bullfrog, quiet mouse
and sees the drop of water falling from his fingers.
She hears the plip of water merging once again
with water, the satisfying ripple of the river
growing greater as it lightly shakes with power.
The animals of tree and branch, the things
that root and snorkel through the grass and thatch
grow quiet as the moss upon the granite.

She’s something special, also freckled,
quiet as a dream of looking up through sunshine
held in water. Sister to the winds she snaps her fingers
and they come. They are old familiars,
first responders, her edgy, banshee sisters.
And she is wind in human form, the fourth wind,
now a zephyr, now a storm. They come from
their oblivion, trailing dust of days and nights,
shedding plastic bags and awesome fragments
of collected sounds.

The trees above the river rattle,
reaching for the windy ceiling.
The sisters whip the air and beat it
with their silver bones. They lace it
with their stolen tones.
They forget where they’ve just been,
where they have been collecting things,
they forget the rusty underpinnings
where no bottom is, no edge, no roof, no ceiling.
They’ve just left the place that holds
the sucking sounds, the shrieking, lurching,
hideous foreknowing, the wide eyed, lunatic,
brokenhearted howling where forgetting
has no ending, where no mind is the state of being.
The sisters visit there where they can merge
and circulate until she calls. And she does call,
because she can, and brings them to her,
and brings them back to knowing.

They play the boy’s hair now,
mess with his rock throwing,
his skipping stones,
his tight, zinging, side-arm action.
One last time he plows a stone
across the water. Then he turns
and runs across the lapping river’s edge
until he’s lost in dappled wind and shadow.
There are footprints fading in the sand
and on the bank the grass is springing back.
It’s warm here in the sun, she thinks,
and calls a wind to bring the last wet stone.

Rick Mobbs 2008