Rain and doubt tossed every way by wind

A poem that tells a dark-and-stormy-night story

Photo by MICHAEL CHIARA on Unsplash

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I first published this back during my first year of Substacking, when I hadn’t met a lot of you folks yet. I think all of you deserve the chance to be dazzled by my first-ever sestina and puzzled by an account of my erratic neighboring skills. And it’s definitely a poem that belongs to the -ember months, so now seems like a good time to share it again.

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AT MY NEIGHBOR’S WINDOW                                                           2023


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.

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I have lived in the same apartment in the same building for — Lord help, half my life now. I’ve been lucky in my neighbors, for the most part; some of them have been eccentric but I don’t remember one who wasn’t pleasant or at least civil, and I trust they’d say the same about me. The non-encounter described in this poem is, hands down, the oddest I one I’ve had in this building in thirty-plus years. I shake my head and second-guess myself every time I think about it, and I’m hugely relieved that things turned out okay for this particular neighbor. (Who, mercifully, doesn’t subscribe to my Substack.)

The first time I posted this poem, I wrote: “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.” And, yeah. Writing this poem helped me sort out a lot of thoughts about my neighbor and myself and concern and codependency and rain-slick fire escapes, all while I madly juggled line-endings. Sestina as narrative: it’s a thing. If it’s not a thing, we should make it one.