Stars in Our Windows
I live in a room in the sky, a room with four windows. I like to stand by the pane in the deep of night and look out at the other windows that surround me, rectangles of wavering warmth retreating motionlessly, endlessly into the darkness over lampstrung hills. Sometimes I see a gesture silhouetted on the blinds a block away, or a shadow steps out onto a balcony, suspended in the air across a gulf of twilight, and the glimmer of a cigarette describes a graceful arc in an invisible hand. Tonight the moon hangs low over the roofs to the west of my room, as yellow in the haze above the hidden sea as the rooms that glow in rectilinear disorder underneath it. I turn my head and look northward, past the tall towers of the rich to distant hills, blacker shadows under the sky, my eyes follow the diminishing recursions of electric campfires, I name them silently in my mind, a row of streetlamps there, a stack of bedrooms to the left, a huddle of porch lights nearly underneath my feet…. A thousand thousand rooms, defined by wood and steel and stone and dust, expressed by light, awkward unconscious poetry of convenience, of timidity, of fatigue and distraction and comfort and love and work.
The night is beautiful, and I walk, often, after dark. There are always people about in my neighborhood, and while there are derelicts and beggars here and there, as well as the habitués of music clubs, I have never, in the year I've lived here, felt uncomfortable. I'm often out at midnight. Not long ago I went to meet my fifteen-year-old son at the nearby movie theater when it let out at 11:30; we walked to a coffeehouse for chocolate, then waited for the bus together. I saw him off in the direction of his mother's house, I watched him through the windows of the bus, saw him sit down among quiet strangers all huddled in their jackets and magazines…. The bus flowed away into the night, I turned and walked home by side streets, passing silent porches and darkened doors.
I lived in Paris for a while, and I used to walk everywhere at any hour--Paris, a city crowded with quick-stepping people and high stone walls, a city sweetly flooded with the darkness of an indigo sky and the silent fountains of its tin-shaded lamps. Often I caught the last Metro home around midnight, I remember standing on an elevated platform crowded with Africans and prostitutes in a poor part of town. No one bothered me or paid much attention to me at all. That same year I was in Manhattan visiting a friend of mine who is a fanatical New Yorker. We walked, walked in the night, even in Riverside Park after midnight. Still alive, more alive….
I live in a room in the sky, a room with four windows. At dusk the lamps of distant bedrooms cast soft shadows onto my ceiling, the sound of heels tapping as an unknown neighbor hurries home becomes a lullaby, and I dream of roofs and windows and an accidental music that swells silently from the arrays of sequestered rooms that I can see. I stand at my window, one of millions, there are no lamps burning in my room, there is no reflection in the mirror to blind me; I look out at what we have built so carelessly, so perfectly, so coincidentally, and I realize the city lights are translating the murmur of our common humanity, the unconsidered harmony that we the citizens of these ordered rooms create with every gesture of our hearts.
I live in a room in the sky. I live in the city.
Go to A Word from Eric Miller
