Agoraphobia

"Yesterday the bird of night did sit,

Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace,

Hooting and shrieking."

                 —William Shakespeare

1.

Imagine waking

to a scene of snow so new  

not even memories

of other snow

can mar its silken

surface. What other innocence  

is quite like this,

and who can blame me

for refusing

to violate such whiteness

with the booted cruelty

of tracks?

2.

Though I cannot leave this house,  

I have memorized the view

from every window—

23 framed landscapes, containing  

each nuance of weather and light.  

And I know the measure

of every room, not as a prisoner  

pacing a cell

but as the embryo knows

the walls of the womb, free

to swim as its body tells it, to nudge  

the softly fleshed walls,

dreading only the moment

of contraction when it will be forced  

into the gaudy world.

3.

Sometimes I travel as far

as the last stone

of the path, but

every step,

as in the children's story,

pricks that tender place

on the bottom of the foot,

and like an ebbing tide with all

the obsession of the moon behind it,  

I am dragged back.

4.

I have noticed in windy fall

how leaves are torn from the trees,  

each leaf waving goodbye to the oak  

or the poplar that housed it;

how the moon, pinned

to the very center of the window,

is like a moth wanting only to break in.  

What I mean is this house

follows all the laws of lintel and ridgepole,  

obeys the commandments of broom  

and of needle, custom and grace.

It is not fear that holds me here but passion  

and the uncrossable moat of moonlight  

outside the bolted doors.

-          Linda Pastan, Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1998)

In honor of little neighbor girls shrieking their bliss in the midnight snow; bound, I listen furtively through the wide front window. 

And for D, whose new favorite poem this is.