Open a window in "Song of Two Windows" and you never quite get a view. The poem begins with a tidy, almost ritual gesture: wind, window, moon, a window opened to the sky, then another to the earth. But what arrives is not scenery. It is voices, a mirror, a drowning girl, a branch of night with bracelets of water. The poem keeps turning outward looking into inward looking, and the effect is dizzying in the best way. Its central idea seems to be that desire and loss cannot be kept apart from perception itself: whatever the speaker sees, he sees through a mirror, and in the mirror someone is always going under.
The pairing of "two girls" from the sky with "a single girl" in the mirror sets up the poem's obsession with doubling. "Each thing she watches / Has become double," we are told, and the poem enacts this on every level. There are two windows, two kinds of voice, a girl of air and a girl of water. Even the language splits and repeats. The strange line "Cold fire is / Cold fire is" stalls on itself, as if the sentence cannot get past its own paradox. Cold fire, the thing the girl holds "like a glass," is an impossible image, burning and freezing at once, and it captures the poem's emotional temperature: passion that has gone numb, or numbness that still burns.
The structure is loose and songlike without being regular. There is no rhyme to speak of and no fixed meter; the short lines work more like breaths or incantations. The refrain-like repetitions ("Wind, window, moon" twice, "In the middle of my mirror / A girl is drowning" twice) give the poem the pulse of a chant, which suits a title that promises a song. Then, abruptly, the form breaks. In the middle comes a block of prose, indented, in which the speaker sticks his head out of the window and sees "a chopper of wind ready to cut it off." This is the poem's most violent moment, and the shift from verse to prose makes it feel like an interruption, a flash of nightmare logic. The wind becomes an "invisible guillotine" on which he has mounted "the heads without eyes of / all my desires." Desire here is blinded and beheaded, and yet the smell of lemon floods the moment, sharp and almost cheerful, before the wind turns into "a flower of gas." Beauty and menace arrive together.
After that, the poem moves to the pool, and the drowning girl becomes a dead one. Her body merges with the landscape: she has "pushed the earth aside / Like a ripe apple," a fish crosses her, and the wind whispers "Darling" but cannot wake her. That last detail is quietly devastating. The wind has been the poem's restless, cutting force, yet here it is tender and helpless. The pool's "gray nipples / Vibrate with frogs," an image that is both erotic and eerie, turning the water itself into a body.
The ending shifts into something like ritual. "God, we hail you," the speaker says, promising payment "To Our Lady of Water," as if the dead girl has been absorbed into a pagan goddess. His final offering is oddly small and practical: "Two small gourds / Because they can keep afloat, / Yes, even in water." The gourds are tender and slightly absurd, the kind of gift you bring to someone you cannot save. Their buoyancy is an answer to the drowning that came too late, and the echo of "two" returns us once more to the doubled windows. The "Yes" in that last line has a human catch in it, a voice insisting on a small hope against an obvious fact.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to explain itself. It does not tell us who the girl is or why she drowns; it lets image follow image with the logic of a dream, and trusts us to feel the connections. The result is a poem in which grief, desire, and the act of looking are tangled together, and in which even a window, that most ordinary opening onto the world, turns into a mirror you can fall through.