Academic journal article Field
Headlines in October
Article excerpt
Addictive day starts with the lit-up screen
against the backdropped window, while the street's
still dark, the gray slate roofs oily with rain.
Distraction of four newspapers' front pages
dicked on to spiral into distant windows
and distant, virtual and dulled encounter.
Better to go down to the café counter
(above which, on a television screen,
the same heads talk) and watch, beyond the windows
a drizzly morning's intersecting streets
that used to open into day, their pages
etched with the calligraphy of rain.
One more fall day, whose uncertain rain
is the most probable, least vexed encounter.
From left to right, from right to left, on pages
or posters, paravent or movie screen,
spectators are the spectacle, when streets
unwind their bobbins below open windows.
Addicted, then transfixed behind the window's
bather, slant light, slant fall of rain,
a mystery enacted on the street's
begrimed and glittery parquet will counter
act the dire pronouncements you can't screen
out, the bad news on the daily pages. …