Blue Window

In that shadowy time before sorrow—
that twilight, October in Berkeley, the early 60’s,

when I walked home along Euclid from Mrs. Runkle’s
where I’d played Schumann’s “Traumerei”

so beautifully, for once, I’d made her cry—
Before the missile crisis, when I sat on the bed in fear and exaltation

and thought of Anne Frank—while on the TV downstairs,
Soviet ships inched closer to Cuba—and wondered,

when they come to get me, when I hide beneath my desk,
my head in my hands, and the walls shake,

will I have told the world
how I love this life I am forced to lose?

Before Christian, my neighbor, drank developing fluid
and his death at Alta Bates took 48 hours, the poison dissolving his stomach,

and his father the beautiful philanderer told my mother,
“The divorce caused it,” just failing to add, wringing

his elegant crooked fingers, “He did it for grief of me”—
before Ronnie, my neighbor, took acid and flew out a window,

and Jackie, my neighbor, drove 90 miles an hour into a stone wall
at prep school in Massachusetts, and Kwaasi, my neighbor,

talked to God and carved his arms and died at Napa,
the boys who lived around me lost, all dead by nineteen—

and before I had ever bled yet, ever got high, or
loved a boy, or played at kisses through Kleenex with Mary Lou—

In that time before my father lay in bed
all one year’s end, the vast flower of his death blossoming,

and wrote, in a tiny crabbed hand, in the datebook I found years later,
“Had to increase the dosage today. Ann and Jink allowance”—

in that Christian Science household no one spoke, silence thickened upon us,
to this day no one has ever said to me, “It was brain cancer,”

but last winter my husband got drunk in his rare blind fury,
ran weeping into the room and pounded the bed over and over,

shouting, “Don’t you understand yet?
In the war they treated men for lice with lindane,

poured it over their heads,
they did it to your father, and now the fuckers tell us

lindane eats your brain.” –In that time, that twilight,
when I walked slowly home along Euclid,

how I wanted to belong to the family I saw
through the blue, wisteria-covered window, to be their girl,

enter their garlicky dinnertime kitchen,
later, to sit on a high attic bed, legs crossed tailor-fashion,

and pick dreamily at white chenille—
I wondered, why not be anyone, go anywhere?

when light dies around the oak leaves
and white, ragged moths come out to beat against the streetlight,

why not knock at the door and say “I am yours. I am here”?

*Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of Blue Window (Archer Books, 2003) and The Trinket Poems, which was runner-up in the 2003 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Chapbook Competition and is published by Wind. A chapbook, “Mississippi,” will appear on The Drunken Boat in the summer of 2005. A new book, Five Terraces, will appear from Wind Publications later in 2005.

She won a 2003 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize for “Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina,” the first section of a book-length poem by the same name. She also won the 2004 Rita Dove Poetry Award from the Salem College Center for Women Writers for a poem called “Rain”; a poem called “October” was a Finalist in the same contest. In 2004 she received the Poetry Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Poetry Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission. A chapbook, “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll Le Grand Fleuve à perte de vue,” received Honorable Mention in the 2005 Center for Book Arts contest. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Connecticut Review, ISLE, Solo, Feminist Studies, Runes, and many other journals, as well as several anthologies. She has been featured online in Poetry Magazine, Forpoetry, Gloria Mundi, and Verse Daily. She has attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop and the Art of the Wild, and has been awarded residencies at The Mesa Refuge and Djerassi, both in California.

A Professor of English, Ann has taught as a senior Fulbright lecturer at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Uppsala University, Sweden. She teaches environmental literature, poetry seminars, and workshops at the University of Mississippi. She is vice president, and in 2006 will become president, of the 1000-member international Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Her academic publications include a book, William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature, and numerous articles on American writers.

Ann also teaches yoga and practices Reiki. She is married to Peter Wirth. They have five grown children.