Sudden Appearance of a Monster at a Window
by Lawrence Raab


Yes, his face really is so terrible
you cannot turn away. And only
that thin sheet of glass between you,
clouding with his breath.
Behind him: the dark scribbles of trees
in the orchard, where you walked alone
just an hour ago, after the storm had passed,
watching water drip from the gnarled branches,
stepping carefully over the sodden fruit.
At any moment he could put his fist
right through that window. And on your side:
you could grab hold of this
letter opener, or even now try
very slowly to slide the revolver
out of the drawer of the desk in front of you.
But none of this will happen. And not because
you feel sorry for him, or detect
in his scarred face some helplessness
that shows in your own as compassion.
You will never know what he wanted,
what he might have done, since
this thing, of its own accord, turns away.
And because yours is a life in which
such a monster cannot figure for long,
you compose yourself, and return
to your letter about the storm, how it bent
the apple trees so low they dragged
on the ground, ruining the harvest.


What We Don't Know About Each Other
Copyright 1993 by Lawrence Raab
Viking Penguin

these Lawrence Raab poems have a common theme for me: how intimately we live with the possibility of personal extinction

the Sudden Appearance of a Monster at a Window warns us our lives are perilous despite the veneer of comfort and safety that allows us to take our ease and devote ourselves to things that "matter" -- here the guy is, alone in his safe house in his safe orchard writing a letter about how the storm screwed up the apple harvest, and without warning, the face of a nightmare appears, the threat of devastation to all he thinks is so secure and normal, the reminder that you actually live on the edge of disaster is clear through that fragile pane of glass, complete with the nightmare's fogging breath, it wouldn't take much for that nightmare to become reality and that complacent life of yours to end

and luckily for him the vision of destruction turns away, for some unknown reason it will not follow through on its awful potential, this time just a reminder, maybe it went on that very afternoon to visit its terrible promise on someone else, and the letter-writer's heart drops back into his chest and he can get back to "reality," I wonder if his hand is trembling just a bit, and if he dreams about it that night

Permanence is a joke, we're fragile, anything can happen, we cannot predict the future, you'd think be be granted at least that since luck has an unfairly huge and unsettling role in our lives even though it seems to go our way more often than no,t at least when it comes to the Big Things like death, given that we still manage to live eighty years on average if we jump the hoops right and don't step on too many cracks - think how we have to trust another driver's luck every second - we're all agreed, this is human life, no way around it, we're all agreed it can all fall apart in an instant before our disbelieving eyes and we know this and still we are disbelieving, so the shock of catastrophe when it comes if it comes is the luck of the draw and real beyond our imagining, we will ourselves into disbelief, because how else could we make it through this day and the next, no wonder we want to retreat into sleep, no wonder we become despondent when sleep retreats laughing before us at 3 a.m. the hour when awareness of our mortality becomes most sickeningly vivid - for all the remaining hours we disbelieve, which is the only way we have a chance of reaching those eighty years

disbelief, plus cracking a lot of jokes...

There was a young man from Peru
Whose limericks all stopped at line two

Why did the chicken cross the road? To have its motives questioned.

"Three blokes walk into a pub. One of them is a little bit stupid, and the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability."—Bill Bailey

Just working another one from this point. I have the bare bones of an idea and the collection of words to go along for the ride. Inspired by this view on Sunday and another outing with the Otley poets.

Now I just need to piece this jigsaw together... I have Friday off as I'm another year older but no wiser. Watch this space .

Thank you Beverley

Wast Water in the Lake District - the central Mountain is Great Gable which is my favourite climb and view

Everything is better with a dusting of icing sugar.

;-) Laughed like a drain

Just scanning this... right that's another line that makes the waste paper basket