Windows
A dirt road enters a growth of trees. Beyond the trees an invisible fire scorches the sky. Just off the road a small windowless house trails a path of dust from road to boarded door, dust a memory of recent movement, toward the troubled woods or away from them, or toward the door. We lived in the house—didn’t we?—you in your sweats and me in my jeans and cutoff sleeves, often went to what we called the grove back then, lay beneath the leaves still green, or walked the other way along the fading road until we reached the broken gate, beyond which a world we didn’t know—the windowless rooms unbearable, if rooms there are, walls humming against the light as they slid across the panes of glass and covered them, the door we wish sealed forever to block our return, the two of us standing in the dusty road and staring off into the orange, swollen sky, while the earth loses its breath—
Patrick Cahill
Patrick Cahill’s poetry collection, The Machinery of Sleep, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2020. A new collection, Frogs in the Basement (working title), will come out in 2025. His prose and poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. He is cofounder and editor of the former Ambush Review, a San Francisco-based literary and arts journal.
I like the solid yet dreamlike sense of place in this piece, a window indeed into a past the narrator wants to enter but is also reluctant to do. It transports me into places of both love and hesitation to embrace that love. Nicely done, Patrick.