Through Denegre's Window Poem by Dennis Ryan

February 6,2005; revised Wednesday morning, January 4,2012

"We might like to think love determines our destiny or that the deep dreams
and passions of the soul... are the truly formative factors that direct our lives.
In actual living, however, only the ideas of business are always with us, from driveway
to desk, from dawn to dusk."
- James Hillman

"I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away,
I don't know where my soul is, I don't know where my home is"
- Nelly Furtado

I see myself seated from behind, alone at the table's edge
looking out the window and at the morning menu; I turn
my back on the world of fact and business, on strangers
and acquaintances alike, the market's morning traffic,
to behold the world from Denegre's window, to behold
the bright greens and yellows of pine, palmetto, palm,
and sawgrass, the dun-colored electric lines disappearing
unseen into green on this sunny Florida Saturday morning.
Crows own every inch of air, and I am the lone black bird
that has broken away, broken free to fly directly overhead,
in my own direction.As I track my flight above the window ledge,
I disappear—What value does this world of compromised wills
have, a world that has lost the flight path of love and sympathy?