late hours {a poem, not by me}

This morning, for the first time since last year, I cracked open a window in my bedroom. I have been resisting this, not because I don't want fresh air—and with the wind blowing as it has been the last few days, there is much fresh air around—but because I winter-proofed all my windows. Cracking them open for the first time would, in my mind, ruin my work.

It's a convoluted logic I use sometimes because in reality, that winter-proofing has done its job and now it's time to let the fresh air in. It's time to breathe air that has a hint of spring in it, which is a kind of air that makes me feel particularly poetry-ish.

After cracking open the window this morning, I found myself in the vet's office, waiting for Little Pug to have some x-rays taken {a story I can tell you another time}. As I sat and tried not to worry, I quickly realized I needed a distraction if this not worrying thing was going to be successful.

And so I pulled out my poetry book, the one I carry around when I feel particularly poetry-ish.

I opened to this poem—"Late Hours," and reading it both calmed me and made me realize that it was the right poem for today.

It's about windows and seasons, and here we are, in a transition season: I'm simultaneously longing for more open windows and thinking longingly of those cozy winter nights.

March is a confused time, for me at least, but this poem makes me glad for open window times and thankful that I've made it through another closed window time.



Late Hours
Lisel Mueller

On summer nights the world
moves within earshot
on the interstate with its swish
and growl, an occasional siren
that sends chills through us.
Sometimes, on clear, still nights,
voices float into our bedroom,
lunar and fragmented,
as if the sky had let them go
long before our birth.

In winter we close the windows
and read Chekhov,
nearly weeping for his world.

What luxury, to be so happy
that we can grieve
over imaginary lives.