Windows @ Home
When I look at the screen, does the screen look back at me?
(Apparently, judging by the ads)
When I’m virtually here, pecking away for hours, busy as a nuthatch on a spotty branch,
Am I really here at all?
Windows, as I started to say, those actual glass portals
on the world outside my inside,
as opposed to these virtual, but insistent openings
to a universe inside a machine
(which one of us is the ghost now?) – not those, but
these open see-through faces,
eyes which do not see,
universal apertures, frames without a point of view,
probabilistic sight lines enabling me to connect the dots,
assuming a continuity which cannot be perceived,
resolvers of epistemological skepticism,
comforters that God is not a deceiver,
reassuring that if/when I look up from those other two-way membranes,
those sinks of pixilated stimulation – not there, but here –
some living, laughing something other still remains,
all right, call it nature, the world
(admit it, you like the old ways of naming)
O, these are my friends and companions,
my frères and semblables, so to speak
watching me, but oh so silently, nonjudgmentally, without calculation,
although (I sometimes wonder)
as I look through them,
do they see through me as well?
Do we lose the mystery of the real,
The depth of now,
That other screen of otherness
We so seldom poke our noses through
(yes, that screen, not this one)
When we walk through space/time, the so-called world
Our noses narrowed on a hand-held universe of shadows?
The world is not, I say, without us
It needs us. It calls to us…
Even now, as I huddle, with my windows@home,
And my other Windows, warming my fingers
On the agitated electrons beneath their caress
And my eyes upon the glassy imitations
of all that messy sensual data
I remember my love of trees and
My sadness at the death of trees
And the ordinary song of a still deeper world
Beyond my window and my Windows
So when I step outdoors
to take in the sunset,
(released of all my media)
the shortest days’ greatest show,
I point and click on “Twilight over the Backhoe”
Or the dump truck
Or the dirt pile huddled amid the laughable orange cones.
And the little tent with the green plastic roof (looking like
the nubbly cloth yanked from the picnic table )
to protect the pipeline diggers on a rainy day
Yes, the world beyond my windows
Remains a garden of enchantments
It’s just I hear my indoors ring
Hot Shots
In the full New England sun
I’m bleached into a ghost, a limp winding sheet
Do not even imagine
The tropics
The flowers are hot and bright
Some cool green things wilt beside them –
which am I?
I try to capture
On the lens of my brain –
Not to mention the Sony Cyber-Shot
I drag around each day to memorialize the radiance of my best students,
my garden stars
Like heroes on the gravestones of time
— the quality of air
when no two-leggers are afoot
Even flying things seem quieted
Bees have no buzz this perfectly sweet
and soporific afternoon
The birds are down to
a few scattered postprandial cheeps
And the echoes of man-made engines hovering above
sound merely like the pleasant burbles
of some contented deity at his afternoon nap
dreaming of lazy, self-indulgent days
Will I ever learn such wisdom?
Robert Knox is a husband, father, freelance writer for the Boston Globe, rabid backyard gardener, and blogger on nature, books, films and other subjects based on the premise that there’s a garden metaphor for everything.
His short stories, poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous literary publications. He was named a Finalist in the Massachusetts Artist Grant Program in fiction, and a story about his father (“Lost”) was excerpted on the Massachusetts Cultural Council website.
Robert’s poems have recently been published by Verse-Vitual, The Screech Owl, Bombay Review, Earl of Plaid and Rain, Party, & Disaster Society.
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