We have, in the immediate foreground, a window. It's a tall, thin window. An old window. A house window. It is, I mean, a window in an old house. There are, it's worth noting, cracks in this window. Long, delicate, arcing cracks that meet at a point on the rattling wooden frame and that are, under a fingertip, sharp and cold as the edges of razor blades.
We have, under this window, a rooftop. The one covering the kitchen on the floor – on the storey – under us. It's gritty, flat and grey, this rooftop, littered with twigs and branches fallen from trees overhanging it, repaired, in spots, with patches of tar the exact same black as a blackboard. There are gutters, loose nails, laundry vents. There is, at this rooftop's corner, a brick chimney, sooty black, with a leaning television antenna above it.
We have, in the middle ground, a thousand houses, all crushed together, the peaks of their glistening slate-shingled roofs straining upward for light and air. They're brick houses, white-clapboard houses, century-old working-class houses, some intricate and Victorian, some hard and square and plain. Jutting up between them, there are, we see, bare trees, leaning street lamps, telephone poles, sagging black cables with
