poem: Glen’s Window Cleaning

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GLEN’S WINDOW CLEANING

Gutter cleaning, pressure washing

moss removal, it’s all there

on the door of his truck with the

chrome tread plate tool box in the bed.

Glen is the type of guy, tidy beard

hair tied back who walks around

slashing the air with arms swinging

as if pulling himself forward

to some place always just ahead.

Does he have sympathy for them?

As he sluices water over the panes

up on his ladder Glen sees people

alone in the windows caught in traps.

Is it their fault they are caught in the trap?

They look back at him, unsurprised

to be seen, really it’s their window

after all, so Glen makes as though

he’s not there but he cannot unsee

like he cannot unknow because once

looking out his own window, night falling

as a tree fanned the grain of black leaves

against the sky, Glen was able to see

who might be watching.


 

Curtis Taylor

How to photograph the details of a dark horse in low light

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There was an old man who lived in her apartment building who she would see wearing the uniform and badge of a private security service. One morning he surprises her in the basement room where the trash bins are kept. He is standing out of the light staring at a pornographic magazine. He doesn’t look up as she empties her waste basket. A couple days later he is in her dreams, wearing a big costume horse head along with the security guard uniform. He takes off the head and stares into her eyes. ‘I love you’ he says and moves closer, slowly, as if beginning a complicated dance step.

This is why he is like that

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A boy went to a party with a girl. He left her alone to join a group of friends smoking and drinking in the basement. Upstairs the girl cried but in a way that no one could see. A young man came into the party. No one knew him. He made friends. He saw the girl who was there crying. The boy came up from the basement. The girl was gone. He went home. When his mother woke him it was past noon the next day. The girl’s father was on the phone. He wanted to know where his daughter was.

After the treatment center went broke and became a tavern

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After the treatment center went broke and became a tavern

He lived out back (sometimes) in a shelter handmade of string, a tarp and some plastic safety fencing. He showed me a photograph of himself from the early days of the tavern. So he never left. He transitioned in a smooth overlap from someone in recovery to a drunk and an addict who lived full-time behind a tavern. That’s how it went after the treatment center went broke, and the next occupant of the building was a tavern. As if that should ever be allowed. In the picture he showed me he was shirtless, very fit and good looking (if a bit thin). In the picture his hair was long and dirty (real Jesus hair) and he was dancing alone like one does late at night near closing time in an almost empty bar. The picture was taken with a flash, the camera close to him. He glowed against a background of amber-lighted gloom. Even though his eyes were closed and he smiled his face was a smock of hopelessness. One wondered where his young wife and child were that night, like where were they the moment that photograph was taken.