Spencer Reece

from The Upper Room

For Mary Jane Zapp

If you looked up, you might have seen me,
although few saw me in that room:
it required crossing the threshold
from the profane to the sacred,
a paradoxical proposition for most, including myself.
But I went in search of the transcendent in those days,
which required leaving a particular world for another.
It is never easy to abandon a world.
It was my second attempt.
This time I was much older
and the strident faiths of my younger colleagues
often gave me pause.

I lived on the third floor on 363 Ronan Street.
By that time in my life I recognized the room was temporary –
from the start, I accepted the dwelling’s transitory nature.
Each November, between shut gray New England spaces,
I saw nervous birds, those itinerant immigrants,
abandon the trees; addicts of seeing,
they charged the horizon when color was removed.
I pressed against the window
as if it were a museum case,
just as the world pressed against the windows of New Haven,
examining each one of us like a relic with a label,
in the same inquisitive, cursory manner.
The skyline was muted, ill-defined:
New Haven sprawled from Gothic elegance
to poverty without drama.
The landscape was obstructed:
we were deaf to the sea’s plainchant, could not smell its stink,
taste its salt, the harbor blocked by a highway and warehouses.

From The Road to Emmaus by Spencer Reece
Copyright © Spencer Reece 2014