Returning, and: Naked Window

Returning

Now I know how the story ends: you will bewith someone else and a small childon your shoulders while I will be alone.The sky is gray in this place I knewyou and the streets have all been rearranged.Where is the house in which you lived? Strangerspassing resemble patients who came to me

that year with their litany of complaints—headache,tremor, rash. I looked down their throats,percussed their lungs, inquired abouttheir medicines, their breathing, their sleep.I remember telling a man I could not cure his pain.I took an x-ray to show I understood it was serious,but I wanted to say this pain, this pain is normal.

Naked Window

For a while, I changed in the bathroombecause I remembered as a girlin the suburbs, the neighbor

across the street rang our doorbellto tell my mother her son had seen menaked. It seems unlikely now he saw much

of anything through that narrowattic dormer. Flash of flesh perhaps,awkward outline of an adolescent

who still kept a diary that was locked.Nothing like the vivid displayacross this street: copper pots

dangling in a fifth floor kitchen;next door, a man on a futontouching a woman's shoulder amid

red and gold pillows. On their wallis a giant mirror in a gilt frame.Last night, my sleep disrupted

by light from the naked glass,I watched a man in a blue shirtrepaint a blue room white.

When he was finished, he openedthe sash, leaned overthe geraniums and smoked.

Each window is likethe museum dioramas I lovedin childhood—period pieces, exact

replicas, and my shadeless bedroomits own diorama: woman alone,early twenty-first-century Manhattan apartment.