Picture Windows

Up on the roof on a cloudy night
just enough above the city life
to feel free of it, yet see it
dancing in the distant windows.

The LaGuardia jets
in a drapery string of landing lights,
the red belt of braking cars
lurching up the side streets to Broadway
and the single taxi rooftop marquee
make the tiniest of technicolor intrusions
into the darkness,
but the lit up windows mark the places called home.

The overheated kitchen,
the tv-blue hued living room,
the creamy-yellow frosted half-sized bathroom pane where
just a moment ago
a mother rinsed away the smell of the city from her second youngest child's head,
wrapped him in her old terry cloth bathrobe and made him king of this cloudy night.