looking over my shoulder

I sit on the roof terrace as smug as the Norman conqueror.

The garden is mine; the roof is the territory of the upstairs renters.  A line as clear as the one Mason and Dixon drew 250 years ago.

But, for a month, there are no other renters.  And I am not one to let a temptation pass without at least a taste.  So, I altered my evening routine by storming the roof -- I could have been a Chinese soldier on the Spratlys.

The world is different up here.

My garden is the realm of dwarfs.  Shadows and good solid dirt.

The roof is the kingdom of elves.  Light.  Tree tops.  Wide open spaces. Where the world is yours for the looking.

I managed to get up here just in time to see one of our Spring sunsets -- more abscess yellow than colorful.  Without clouds as a backdrop, the sun sets behind the western hills with as much charm as Leona Helmsley.  All celebrity.  No stage.

 

But there is more to the evening than sunsets.  Sounds take on a brilliance of their own at this height. 

A group of young boys joyously wreak havoc on an ever-pulpifying cardboard box.

A wizard's black coven cloud of grackles race by at rooftop level -- hoping speed and numbers will protect them from the evening's raptors.

Followed by another flock of much smaller birds I have never been able to identify.  But their massed wing noise startles me each evening on the malecon as they rush home.

And always the ever-present percussion of the ocean fisting the steep shore.  Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield duking it out to an eternal draw.

All of it -- the birds, the boys, the beach -- weave a perfect tapestry for my evening's reading.  I am in the midst of Billy Collins's latest collections of poems.  Ballistics.

It could not be a more perfect night for poetry.  Those of you who have been been reading this blog for any time know that I am very fond of the work of Billy Collins.

He knows his craft.  How to take a sauté pan filled with notions and reduce them to the essence of daily existence.  Lines of poetry capable of piercing the heart, pinging the brain, or tickling the funny bone -- sometimes simultaneously.


Let me give you a brief example. 


In August in Paris, he sets the mood by looking over the shoulder of an artist to see what he is painting.  He then ponders why he cannot similarly see his readers looking over his shoulder as he jots in his notebook.

But every time I turn around
you have fled through a crease in the air
to a quiet room where the shutters are closed
against the heat of the afternoon,
where there is only the sound of your breathing
and every so often, the turning of a page.

As I read those lines on the roof terrace, my thoughts turn to you -- my readers.  And I wonder what your day has been like.  Whether you saw the red ball on the neighbor's lawn.  Or heard the children laughing.


And just what we would talk about if I turned around to see you there -- catching you just as you tried to disguise the rolling of your eyes.