Open Window

Why don't you open the window?

he asked her.

I don't know she said.

Don't you like listening to

the outside?

I don't know.

It went on like this for a moment.

There was something outside that window

the hum of a not too distant muffler, a June bug,

maybe, if he concentrated hard enough, it was

a moth’s wings applauding the porch light; it

was just beyond him but closer to the

double-paned glass. 

It was something that she could not hear. Did

she not want to hear what he heard? Did she not

love the sound of lavender on the air just barely

creeping through the mesh of the screen:

how it crawled in the moonlit grass. It perched itself

in the bloomed pear tree—it rested itself in a jagged

half circle keeping the night bugs at bay.

The window still closed.

He listened and waited. After all

he had imagined in love of a night

within just a whisper, just a breath

of his own corralled excitement, what

he heard, after all, was her xylophonic

snore.