THE
WINDOW
839
And always we suffer this two-way traffic, impulses outward and
images inward
Distracting the heart.
And the infant's eyes are drawn to the blank of light, the window,
The small boy cranes out to spit on the pavement, the student tosses
His midnight thoughts to the wind, the schoolgirl ogles the brilliantined
Head that dazzles the day
While the bedridden general stares and stares, embarking
On a troopship of cloud for his youth or for Landikotal, evading
The sneer of the medicine tray.
Take-off outwards and over and through the same channel ,an intake–
Thistledown, dust in the sun, fritillaries, homing pigeons,
All to which senses and mind like sea anemones open
In this never private pool;
The waves of other men's bodies and minds galumphing in, voices
demanding
To be heard or be silenced, complied with, competed with, answered,
Voices that flummox and fool,
That nonchalantly beguile or bark like a sergeant-major,
Narcotic voices like bees in a buddleia bush or neurotic
Screaming of brakes and headlines, voices that grab through the
window
And chivvy us out and on
To make careers, make love, to dunk our limbs in tropical
Seas, or to buy and sell in the temple from which the angry
Man with the whip has gone.
He has gone and the others go too but still there is often a face at
your window-
The Welsh corporal who sang in the pub, the girl who was always
at a cross purpose,
The pilot doodling at his last briefing, the Catalan woman clutching
the soup bowl,
The child that has not been born:
All looking in and their eyes meet yours, the hour-glass turns over
and lies levd,
