Maryfrances Wagner
Windows
We bought the house for the windows,
the way relationships can start
with the turn of a shoulder or release
of a loose glove. With a house we
participate in its angles, transcend
its zigzagged cracks. We become
impenetrable. Our eyes close like slow
shades. Read us like unbolted patterns, painted
over by ways the heart forgets because the view
from the window is a silent wilderness.
Life accelerates while beauty holds up her
walls but lets go of us. We move to the yard
where we see windows the way birds do
before they stun themselves.
Maryfrances Wagner’s newest books are The Silence of Red Glass, The Immigrants’ New Camera, Red Silk (re-issued), and Solving for X . She co-edits I-70 Review, serves on The Writers Place board, was 2020 Missouri Individual Artist of the Year, and is Missouri Poet Laureate 2021-2023. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry East, Voices in Italian Americana, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, et. al. For more information, check her website:
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