The Window Washer’s Etude
A woman in a black gown standing in a tree belting out arias: cocaine-white hair, rummy ovoid mouth. Attack sparrows gunning for baby strollers. Window washers see the oddest things. People shaving. A computer flashing an Elvis screensaver in a well-lit room. Empty shoes. An epee, cane, a few golf clubs, and an umbrella jutting up over the lip of a dumped tin cylinder. Couched people watching daytime TV. There are no right ways to intrude into the worlds of others. Whispering gesundheits through the dripping soap suds, averting eyes at all times, stroking the wiper down evenly, firm and steady. A slight swing as the wind lifts, harsher twenty flights up, as the ropes slip and pull, and the shoddy wood boards beneath rock and lightly tap against the frame. “I am not the sky,” or perhaps a song that lulls fear away from boredom into a clasp of concentrated gripping and letting go, what’s done or in need of doing one hitched pull up the glass at a time. Squinting through reflected glare. No water spots. No runs of crooked soap lines or streaky patterns of dirt. Long, straight parallels of squeaky clean glint. To look down’s not the matter or a flake of concern. Not even a stray worry over the acceleration of gravity since a thing’s been let go: that good old 22 mph drop, with, of course, that sudden stop at the end. A scrape, a sway, and the soap bucket goes wild. A bleach-tinged melody of froth floats on a lost moth’s wings: “Tiiiiny bubbles...make me feel fine.” Clouds cut through and crumble like cauliflower bits, craggy and brushed, rib-bone stretched along in wayward clumps, broken tiaras, jumper-cable clamps, splintered seesaws, fleecy bits of robe, clown makeup gone awry in a herringbone of hazy pale blue. Latticed silent space between time. Seized and, suddenly, gone. Where do the seconds go? Climbing in trebles of the clock tower’s sardonic chime: “You are where you are, high up, above. Let go.” The sheen after a tight pull downward, shine laced with ambition, and so a man stares into a shaving mirror and laughs. People darting from bathroom to bedroom wrapped in towels. A maid vacuuming around dirty clothes and magazines. A little towheaded girl in a tutu dancing alone in a room. Just passing through. Just tingeing your view to a sharper glaze. People who cry while drinking from a cereal bowl. The screech of a parakeet gone mad with loneliness. Barks of home-bound dogs. A cat asleep on the sill. The in-between hours. Afternoons most folks blow off and work through. Shades pulled. Cracks in blinds spying into dusty unkempt lives. Staid mysteries in randomly humdrum kitchenettes. So many flat whimpers etched into ordinary hallways lined with gilt-framed oils and grimy Victorian nudes, a phone off the hook, day sleepers and nap takers: the wayward leaders of dull, defeated lives. Retired nannies playing cards in lawn chairs. A smile from a shirt-sleeved stranger making the bed. “You cannot see me.” And whatever other wishes believing gets.
Sit flat, legs dangling, or lie down between floors on the hard bare boards. Share some space with a curious pigeon. Eat a sandwich while dreaming into the cloud-flecked azure: a place that’s as close as breath yet somehow farther away than childhood. Somewhere below there are orange cones and “Men Working Above” signs. And drops of water like old gum stains on the sidewalk. And people striding by who swing wide around it all, sometimes glancing up, visoring their hands to shade the sun, perhaps in awe of the daring men who swing on boards held up by just ropes so impossibly high above.
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