New Tenants

I watch as the new tenants,

A young man and a young woman,

Move in across the street, third floor balcony, directly opposite mine.

I am on the second floor. They moved in two weeks ago, I believe, and

So they have not yet become fixtures in my associations of the place.

I am not certain what to make of them.

I do not see them as I write. Although they are

There across the street over the balcony rail, through

The plate-glass sliding door, I am looking at myself.

Although I am seated in a green plastic chair stacked in a second

Green plastic chair factory-molded to stack thus for easy storage,

What I see derives from other earlier places and previous points of view.

How many tenants have I known?

I look up across the street, thinking back.

I recall ideas of persons.

I see the associations I made.

I am looking at myself.

The immediate specifics

(the dark-haired man wears a painter’s hat over his hirsute mien, dark T-shirt, faded jeans; and the paler woman of womanly build, long light-brown hair, pale belly exposed by her too-small shirt above the hip-hugging sweat pants with slightly flared leg-bottoms)

Come to me on the page, only to the page from memory.

My eye turns inward in order to describe them, and

What I choose is of myself.

I am here on the balcony.

I am also looking back, at

The page, and back again. In that place, where

Am I sitting, over

What rails and through what

Glass am I looking?

I do not know what to make of it.

KLK

1/11/2008