Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Kitchen Window” by Rob Ruttan.

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Kitchen Window

By Rob Ruttan

By middle August the sun

starts to swim more quickly across the sky,

leaving a late afternoon’s

cool touch of melancholy on the skin.Goosebumps

like a calendar,

black edges around a darker blue dotted

with southbound birds in the fading upper reaches.

My mother doing the after-dinner dishes

would look out the back window & sigh.

“There goes another summer”, she’d say. She hated the north,

its short seasons of hope

followed by pitiless nights

at the bottom of winter,

timbers of the house snapping

In the iron cold as night fell.

The boy in the backyard sensed something emptying

as those cooling winds of late August

turned like a cat’s ghost

around his ankles.

In the kitchen window, like a chipped picture frame,

he’d see his mother look her tired reflection

in the eye

and he did, yes he did,

notice that gaze.

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Copyright © Rob Ruttan

Rob Ruttan hails from Thunder Bay, in the People’s Republic of Northwestern Ontario. He now lives in Barrie. He has published in The Malahat Review, Event, The Nashwaak Review, and his photography has appeared as cover art cover art for Orion and Event. He is a retired high school teacher.

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