Windows

By Tracy

Windows everywhere. Here is a little poem about windows, specifically Drehkippfenster or tilt-and-turn windows, though the photos show many other kinds. Tilt-and-turn are apparently the most common type of window in Germany. 

Tilt-and-turn

The windows are uncountable

yet plural. On every outdoor

town-view, they dominate – also

singly, from inside, loom over us.

Hold threads under tension, a frame.

Edgy magic, they might unhinge,

fall inward. We tilt them back to air

the room for want of fan or vent,

releasing vapours, our humours.

Out there, commingled.

They gauge the day, admit

street-sound, anonymous.

No veil, this pane, no projection

of hymen, fantastic intactness;

it was always already open.

Not for turning your back on.

Nor for dreaming you live in

another’s life. Rather for keeping

charge like custodia fenestrārum,

alone in a crowd, turning this blind

eye as I hoist or lower the sail.

                                      (Tracy Ryan)

The poem is also engaging indirectly with aspects of the window-ideas in poems by Mallarmé and Baudelaire, as well as the (I think) misguided use of the hymen in de Man and Derrida.

I've also developed an interest (or further developed a very old, long-held interest) in the various kinds of dormer windows, some of which you can see in these photos.

"Custodia fenestrārum" in the poem is making a kind of play on custodia oculorum or custody of the eyes, which is enjoined in monastic (and general religious) life — I use it not because of any empathy with the prudery of those who tout this term nowadays, but because of the sense that when living in a densely populated place (unfamiliar to a rurally-based Australian!), windows are more acutely potential sites of failure to respect privacy — in all directions.