The World Through Your Window 

East Coast woman,
I can hear through your window,
in the early fall,
the world at work.
Planes’ vapor trails bisect the skies,
trucks on business sound shimmeringly in the background.
Trains at least almost on time. 

So they say Capitalism is triumphant
and these are probably the sounds you’d hear
through a Shanghai window as well. 

Enveloped by this world at work,
I wonder at the poet’s place.
Is it to celebrate?
To make a Sandburgian romance out of it all?
So long as it is more attractive than not,
contrast it with the naked life of the prairie,
perhaps with the sounds of other cities in other times?
Times of crisis, fulmination, transformation.
I wonder if there is more to life
than packaging oneself. 

A dialectic healed over leaving rough bumps,
little nationalisms,
ethnic strife,
a Superpower barreling and swaggering drunkenly.
This Reagan, there was a dark side to him.
If it got played out for kicks years ago in this country,
the guns still go off elsewhere,
places where the grudges go deeper than I hope this Constitution allows.
Places where the pendulum swings more wildly than from a to maybe b.

There are games other than baseball out there,
ways of thinking other than frat boy white.
I can’t and don’t pretend to know them all,
condone them all,
I try to play the game I know.
Woman, the world outside your window hums.
Maybe I just wish it was a more soulful tune.

© Peter Baroth/Philly