poems by owen lucas

Sat out on the ledge
cleaning windows, I can see
the whole street. The pane
is clamped on my legs
as I lean out and squeegee
its brown corners. The hedge,
the paving, the road, sway
below like branches of a tree.
In my curling, sundried head
they are the black dregs
of dust, sap, wasp water,
wrung out of a jay cloth sky.
My hands are gritty, grey
speckled with chipped paint
and bitty, rotten wood,
the windows smeared with dried
muck in microscopic shoals,
but to feel the air, the day
drinking in a stranger sun
and to see an idle task
at least adequately done
is all that I could.