Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Seven
November- December 2025
Window, story by Mark Roberts.
Window
It has become something of a ritual. After I eat my dinner, tonight a plate of steamed vegetables from the garden just beyond the first hill, I stand and walk across the room to the large window facing the ocean. The light is fading and I can watch darkness fall across the water. Sometimes the waves are choppy and the sky full of clouds blocking the moon and stars and you have to strain to see the line of sky and water. Other times it is clear and the ocean is flat so that there is no movement but the sparkle of moonlight on the water.
Tonight, as I reach the window, there are still streaks of red and pink within the few wispy clouds that stretch towards the horizon. The sky is a dark blue and I know that over the coming minutes the last trace of colour will disappear. The brightest stars are already out and if I look slightly to the south I will see a group of of eleven stars twinkle into life. I know the old names of the constellations but, like most other things, I have renamed them. These stars I have called the ‘typewriter’ – there is a base of five stars, four stars form the keys and three stars form a rough line across the top. Some nights it is easier to see than others. Further south there is the ‘book’, to the north the ‘carrot’ and yet to rise is the ‘coffee pot’. When you look at the night sky for hours patterns continue to emerge and evolve, once all the stars formed together in a huge image of a beast about to swallow my apartment block.
I used to be able to stand at this window and watch ships, but it has been years now since I have seen one. They used to pass by all the time, two an hour, at night you could watch their lights move slowly up and down the coast. Then, about the time people started leaving the city, they became less frequent until, about two years ago, they ceased completely. It was as if each person was connected to one of the boats and when they left their boat no longer sailed past the city.
It was after Joseph, the old man who had once fixed violins for a living and who would occasionally still play late at night, the slow mournful music sinking into my dreams, left the city. That Monday night, walking home with my bucket of water from the well, I noticed that there was no candle light coming from his room. I climbed the stairs only to find his door open. Inside his breakfast still on the table, the coffee half drunk and cold, a hard boiled egg neatly sliced on a plate. I returned the next day and nothing had changed. By the third day I knew I was the last one left in the city. Eleven days later, at 10.38pm I saw the lights of a small ship heading north east. It took over two hours to disappear over the horizon. It was the last ship I have seen from this window.
I occasionally used to think I saw a ship’s light, but I they were always stars rising, emerging from the dark edge of the ocean. For a minute they hover on the edge of the horizon and, at first can be mistaken for the light on top of a ship’s mast, but they always kept rising and by now I know each star off by heart, the point at which it will rise from the ocean on a particular day of the year, what time it will rise and and how it will travel across the sky.
Now that I am completely alone the night sky has become a silent link to the rest of the world. I know that light from the stars has been travelling for years to reach my window – there, the light from the star in the bottom right of the ‘carrot’ has taken fifteen years to reach me, the light from the middle star of the roller on ‘the typewriter’ has been travelling for almost sixty five thousand years. I think of someone else looking up at the same star, of viewing my typewriter from a different angle, a different position on the earth. I sense a connection not just with the moment but with a history of starlight. Eighty years ago a poet in England lay on the grass and watched the stars overhead, ancient astronomers studied my star and calculated the start and end of seasons; fifteen years ago Maree and I held hands and watched the starlight in the hills above Florence.
I can sense the moonrise approaching, more spectacular to my my mind than sunrise. I feel a silence over the ocean, hear the stars dim. I always close my eye and listen. I have learnt to read the sounds, the slight change in air pressure, the song of the night birds in the trees behind my apartment. Opening my gaze at the instant before the moon appears, rising silver on the
horizon. Easy to understand why you could think it a god as the waxing moon, moving towards fullness, appears rising out of the nothingness beyond the horizon. A cold light, poetic, throwing unexpected night-time shadows.
Looking down at the front of my apartment I can see in the moonlight the water already halfway across the road and the tide still coming in. Next week, with the full moon and the king tide I expect the ocean to reach the steps of the apartment for the first time. It will retreat again a little but that first touch of the building will be symbolic – the beginning of the final stage. The ocean is slowly washing away the city, the people have gone, the beach washed away, the old promenade, where I used to walk with friends, where I would take coffee during the day and wine at night, is mostly under water now. I can occasionally see the green roof of the cafe, just visible at low tide, the table and chairs long since swallowed by the waves.
I read once of an English village, built on a cliff, that had been falling into the sea since the twelfth century. Homes, buildings and roads have been collapsing on the beach ever since the sea began surging at the cliff face in the twelve century. As one building collapsed the owners would retreat and build a new building at the back of the town. Slowly over the centuries the village has moved almost 5 kilometres inland as the sea advanced.
I think of my own city, abandoned, facing the advancing ocean, each tide marking out a new boundary. There is no one to rebuild. I stand here each night and observe the toing and froing of the tide and I know in a year or maybe two my own building will start to crumble. I am not sure what I will do. Should I retreat to another building in the city, further away from the waves. A building I am not familiar with, and live in a room that it is not my own. Or should I stand at the window and watch the tide surge into the foyer and wash away the foundations. Should I stand here and disappear into the waves?
The stars keep rising and move across the sky. The ocean, calm tonight, captures the silver of the moon, dancing on tips of waves as they move closer to me. Soon it will be time to turn away from the window when the tide begins to turn and sit at my desk and write of the night sky and the ocean and what lies in my future past the dark line of the night horizon.
© Mark Roberts
For much of the last four decades, Mark Roberts has been involved in writing, criticism and publishing. In 1982, he established P76 magazine in with Adam Aitken and has been involved in small press publishing ever since. In 2011 he set up the on-line journal Rochford Street Review, which is currently publishing Issue 42 https://rochfordstreetreview.com/
The Office of Literary Endeavours (5 Islands Press 2025) is Mark’s third book, after Stepping out of Line (Rochford Street Press 1986) and Concrete Flamingos, Island Press 2016.