It Was a Dark and Stormy Night ...

... and the strangest thing happened, and years later I wrote a poem about it.

Photo by Matthew Sichkaruk on Unsplash

When you have a complicated story to tell, or complicated feelings about the story you’re telling, sometimes a complicated poetic form is just the container you need. More later about the form. Here’s the story.

(N.B. This one is best read on a full-size screen — it’s a long poem full of long lines, and your iPhone or tablet will break them in places I did not. Just saying.)

---

AT MY NEIGHBOR’S WINDOW


On a steel-gray twilit afternoon I visit the apartment of my neighbor,
tending her mail and orchids while she enjoys a work-from-home escape
to Tuscany, where it is hard to imagine even the nights are dark
and cold, as they are here in this December. I tug open her window,
hoping to stir the room’s stale air with whispers of coming rain,
then shiver as memory engulfs me, riding in on the same wet wind.

A night – ten years ago? fifteen? – of winter storm, and through the weeping
  wind
I hear a weird soft feral clash repeating downstairs where my neighbor
lives, mostly unheard – an endless unrhymed clatter just louder than the rain.
I peer out, catch a glimpse below of slatted blinds straining to escape
their cords and fly away, they flail and crash on the sill of the window
she has left half-open, in this bitter storm, hours after dark.

Downstairs to her door, to knock. Again. No answer. Back home, still in the
  dark,
still haunted by that aimless clatter, what possessed me, on a night of wind,
to clamber out onto the slatted metal perch outside my window
and, shivering, inch down a wet steel ladder to where my neighbor’s
blinds surged over their storm-battered sill, still urgent to escape
from that room, that life, to fall or freeze or learn to fly through rain?

Did I do that, or dream it? Did I dream crouching, squinting between rain-
soaked slats to see her room, the single lamp that thinned the dark,
the desk where she slumped, head on folded arms, sleep or some harsher
  escape
enfolding her? No sign she heard the storm or felt its wind 
invade her room, no sign she sensed the gaze of a reluctant neighbor
who crouched, another rain-soaked invader, outside her window.

How many times did I raise a cold wet hand to her window,
to thump the clumsy frame down to the sill, shut out the rain?
Wait, though; if she should hear and wake, what would she see – a neighbor
or a terror, this strange sodden body looming outside in the dark?
I peered in, grieving, at her stillness, sighed a long breath into the wind,
and felt my way, stair by slick metal stair, back up the fire escape.

And if this were a novel, the kind you read on days you long to escape
into a world where the worst always comes right, that night would be a
  window
into new life: a woman rouses from her stupor when the wind
sends her dead mother’s lamp crashing to a floor slick with rain,
and stiff with cold and grief and whiskey she blinks into the dark
and thinks: Enough, there must be more light somewhere.  – Neighbor, 

my memory peers through winter dark back to that night, through rain
and doubt tossed every way by wind; meantime you made your own escape
into the light you craved. Salute, neighbor. Tuscan sun shine through your
  window.

---

[You can listen to an audio version of the poem using the widget above the photograph. Apologies for the motorcycle in the background halfway through. Sheesh. ]

See? Complicated.

First, briefly, about the poetic form: did you recognize it? If not, here’s everything you want to know about the sestina, including examples and handy tips on how to build your own. Classically, I think, the sestina has been used by poets to expand on big-question themes; I’ve also seen it used for narrative poetry, though, and I think it works brilliantly for telling an atmospheric story.

Now, about the story: anything you may have asked yourself as you read — “But what if she’d been…?” “Could you maybe have…?” “Good Lord, woman, why didn’t you…?” — I promise, I’ve already asked myself all those same things, on the night in question and in the years since. On the night, caught in a familiar bind between the urge to do something and the fear of doing the wrong thing altogether, I decided to step away … and by grace, or by luck if you prefer, that decision did no harm. If my neighbor and I had been more than hello-in-the-hall acquaintances at that point, or if I’d believed she was in extremis, would I have done something more? If I had, would it have helped? I still can’t be sure. On the night, conflicted as I was, my strongest sense was of how terrifying it would be for her to rouse from sleep or stupor to find someone on the fire escape struggling to close — or open — her window. In the moment, that seemed like more potential damage than the situation gave me the right to inflict. But you’d best believe I said a prayer as I climbed back up to my apartment, and breathed a deep sigh of relief next time I saw my neighbor in the hallway.

All this to say: if you’re wondering why the hell I didn’t climb in the window that night and make sure she was still breathing, I get that. And if you’re wondering why the hell I was out on the fire escape in the pouring rain looking through her window in the first place, believe me, I get that too.

I wrote the poem this spring — more than two years after I visited my neighbor’s apartment to tend her plants, fifteen years at least since the night she left her window open. It’s the first time I’ve told the story; I’ve certainly never brought it up with my neighbor. She quit drinking some years ago, started adopting orchids and other houseplants, became much more approachable. She tells me stories sometimes about the crazy start-ups she works for; we trade favors, and opinions about the other residents in the building. Apartment-house lives, sharing ceilings and floors … and just once, on a dark and stormy night, sharing a window.