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From Jacket Weather: Radiator

I missed her before dawn with the radiators coming on.

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After three days of media hysteria over the coming blizzard, after they pronounced it historic in advance and called it the blizzard of the century, after all the canceled flights and closed airports and chains on the bus tires, after the supermarkets sold out of bread including the honey-nut whole-grain English muffins and toaster-ready corn cakes and Portuguese festival spelt loaf, and after the bodegas sold out of bottled water including every last bottle with a label printed in Cyrillic, you know what happened? It snowed. Yes, on Saturday night it snowed, and Sunday we walked up Fifth Avenue through the slush moats at every curb, and I wound up in a boyfriend chair at Lord & Taylor.

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White-topped water towers on a white sky. The snow is whiter by the minute, in contrast to the sky. There’s no such thing as time, and the world is yours. Snow white on grey sky.

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green Brussels-sprout leaves in a white sink

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The radiators clank, and hiss, and bang, and hiss.

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I sat in this room as it got dark. I didn’t pick up a book or a magazine. Didn’t get dinner started. Just sat on the couch, looking out the window. The sun had got below the cloud ceiling and chosen the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings and a band of apartment buildings, which stood in a dark blue sky transmitting now a burning auspicious gold, now vermilion. At 5:00 the lights at the top of the Chrysler Building started in quick increments like the opening of a fan, and soon the others, only just now red, had given up the ghost, gone dull, and left me with the feeling of a drug wearing off, returning me to my senses and time’s flow, and it was just another night.

From Jacket Weather: Three Views from One Window

Saturday afternoon at the Vermeer, reading on the bed. I keep looking up from the book to the outside wall, with its window reflecting water towers and rooftops and sky. A view like an old linen postcard. Read another page or two. Back to that window, and those cutouts climbing against the sky in jumbled reds, blonds, and browns, doubled in the glass, no weight, no mass, no movement. Pigeons.

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Saturday afternoon, reading on the bed. My attention wanders from the page to the window outside ours, the water-tower skylines superimposed in rising ranks—dozens of water towers, and all the intricacies of a cityscape lit by the sun: facades, arched windows, cornices, cranes, scaffolding—row on row of these in the placid light, every detail registered on the glass plate. A world without mass, without time, without sound, dreaming itself all day in the glass. With a frame around it. One puff of rising steam.

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Sunday I’m reading on the bed. In our neighbor’s window the water towers are stacked in a lemongrey sky. All day the light doesn’t change. All day a tea-kettle wind is whistling in the vents and the white slow plumes of steam are rising. All day I’m here reading—how many of those do you get in a year? In a lifetime? Late in the afternoon the sun comes out. And then the light gets dialed down and dialed down until, in a deep-blue sky, only a few silver rooftop pipes are still gleaming. Dialed down until there’s one white water tower bobbing on a sea of night that’s poured into the streets below, and those rooftop pipes are the gold of smoked sable.