Window

Spencer Reece

O New York City!
Your sky is sharp.
Saw the light grow
and fill in January
with a Delft blue,
clear as Vermeer
at the Frick: clarity
I love most of all.
City I could marry.
A brilliant violet
streaks the edges.
Uzbekistan market,
I taste your mint,
meat and beets.
Couldn’t sleep again.
The cut hyacinths
hold a musty scent.
All these shadows
by Jasper Johns.
I hear the traffic
on 6th. The air clean.
The snow like felt
upholsters the streets.
I look out, I look up.
I am at the height
of the cross now—
so close I can touch it.
My mother is dead.

Spencer Reece is the author of The Road to Emmaus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

Themes

About this Poem

“This poem is from an upcoming sequence of poems dedicated to my mother. Seventeen poems, one for each day in January that my mother lived, before dying on the seventeenth of January in 2026. The sequence tracks how the faith of the maker has awoken through the death of a mother, and how she lives on in art. The poem takes place in the home of Andrew and John Habich Solomon, formerly the home of Emma Lazarus, which has been a refuge for me as I’ve drifted about the world.”
—Spencer Reece

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I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier, selling suits to men I call “Sir.” These men are muscled, groomed and cropped— with wives and families that grow exponentially. Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties, of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots, of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars, of foulards, neats, and internationals, of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin. I often wear a blue pin-striped suit. My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples. On my cheeks there are a few pimples. For my terrible eyesight, horn-rimmed spectacles. On

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Window

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