We are at the thin brink that marks indoors and out, you on the high ladder and I between the glass and the sheer curtain of the upstairs window. Our gloved hands circle, a single swan riding its own reflection. Like Pisces, we face both ways.
We lean and tilt in the always moving sun, in whose slant the suspended smudges are so patently still. With old diapers, newspapers, scraps we barely recognize, we rub until the window fairly brims with apparent hardness.
And I am remembering that glass is a liquid, but so viscous, so slow, that even in this seventy-year-old house the windows have not yet begun to flow over the sills. A faint waviness, it may be, ripples behind the drapes we draw each night, but that is all.
Then you stretch for a corner, and the ladder flexes and shifts beneath your body's weight. My legs ache in sympathy. I am all emptiness. There is a moment when, to stop your fall, I would put my hand through the cataract frozen brittle between us.
But you do not fall. Instead, through the barely visible striations of the pane, your eyes widen to mine. You take a breath, and the window flattens like the skin of a lake at evening when the wind dies. The glass gives a long sag and spills to fluency, to this hard-pouring light, these baptizing waters.
Originally published in South Coast Poetry Journal