What you can't see from this window,
Although you're six stories up,
Although you see nearly the whole city,

Is the green bench by the river,
Or the woman standing beside that bench
Who walks and sits, walks and sits,

Or her hand readjusting the pink scarf
Or the watch on her wrist that says
Everything's doubtful.

What you can't see are the frogs
Curled like brown fists in frozen mud
Or the cicada shell snagged
On the bark of the poplar,
Or the torn squirrel's nest in its branches.

You can see the river,
But not the bench.
You can see the highway,
The headlights, but not the one car
Or the one man who steps
Out of it, buttoning his coat, going
down the river walk–one, two,
three steps–before he stops, curses,
Pushes his hands through his hair,
Reverses direction.

But if you watch the river
Long into the night, if you lower
Yourself from the window
Down and down into its brown
Rush, you'll see what remains, taste
The reverb of his scotch at the back
Of your throat, feel the ache in
your instep from her four-inch heels.
You'll see the dresser where he throws
His change, the mirror she frowns into.
Hairbrush, coffee mug, lipstick, keys.









Anne Agnes Colwell is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. In 2007, she received an Emerging Artist Award in Fiction from the Delaware State Arts Council. She also received the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize for 2007 which included publication of her chapbook Father´s Occupation, Mother´s Maiden Name. Her work has appeared in several journals, including California Quarterly, Evansville Review, Southern Poetry Review, Poetrybay, and Octavo. An online chapbook of her poems appears in The Alsop Review. Her first book of poems, Believing Their Shadows, is forthcoming from Word Press. She received the Delaware State Arts Council´s Experienced Artist in Poetry Award in 1999. Her critical book, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, was published by the University of Alabama Press. She lives in Milton, Delaware with her husband, James Keegan, and son, Thomas.
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