If I had read this quote from Flannery O'Connor
before I wrote the poem, it would stand at the top of it
as an epigraph.
But I'll read it to you anyway.
She wrote once that a "writer should never
be ashamed of staring.
There is nothing that does not require attention."
And this poem is about a habit that poets, I think,
tend to have.
It's called-- the title is "Monday."
The birds are in their trees, the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.
They are at their windows in every section
of the tangerine of earth--
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon, the American poets
gazing out at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.
The clerks are at their desks, the miners are down
in their mines, and the poets are looking out their windows,
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or a bathrobe is involved.
The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong game
of proofreading, glancing back and forth from page to page.
The chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job, for which they are paid nothing
every Friday afternoon.
Which window it hardly seems to matter,
though many have a favorite.
But there is always something to see,
a bird grasping a thin branch, the headlights
of a taxi rounding a corner, those two boys in wool caps
angling across the street.
The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs.
And the poets continue to stare at a cracked birdbath or a limb
knocked down by the wind.
By now it should go without saying,
what the oven is to the baker and the berry-stained blouse
to the dry cleaner, so the window is to the poet.
Just think, before the invention of the window,
the poets would have to put on a jacket or a winter hat
to go outside, or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.
And when I say a wall, I do not mean
a wall with striped wallpaper and a sketch
of a cow in a frame.
I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet, the original woman's heart
of stone, the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.