If you are of a certain age, you may remember storm windows. Not the aluminum or vinyl variety, which came along later, but heavy wooden storm windows. Every fall my father, in the company of other homeowners, spent the better part of a Saturday putting up our clunky wooden storm windows. Every spring, he took them down. When I grew old and strong enough, he allowed me to help him.
In his poem “Storm Windows,” the American poet Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) recalls a rainy autumn day when he was walking down the sidewalk and caught sight of storm windows lying in a yard:
People are putting up storm windows now,
Or were, this morning, until a heavy rain
Drove them inside. So, coming home at noon,
I saw storm windows lying on the ground,
Frame-full of rain . . .
Taking a closer look, Nemerov notes “the crushed grass” visible through the water and the windowpane. Appearing to “stream away in lines,” the flattened grass resembles “seaweed on the tide” or “blades of wheat leaning under the wind.”
At this point, the poem takes an unexpected turn. Until now a literal description enhanced by visual similes, it becomes a vehicle for introspection:
The ripple and splash of rain on the blurred glass
Seemed that it briefly said, as I walked by,
Something I should have liked to say to you,
Something . . .
Employing an ellipsis to mimic a pause in his thought, Nemerov depicts a mind venturing inward—or, as the 13th-century Zen master Eihei Dogen put it, “turning the light inward.” And what that light illuminates is not only thoughts in the process of articulation but also unrealized feelings, brought to the surface by the sight of “dry grass bent under the pane / Brimful of bouncing water.” Seen through the rippling, splashing water and the water-blurred glass, the trapped grass becomes the visible counterpart—what T.S. Eliot called an “objective correlative”—of the poet’s inchoate thoughts and yet-to-be-spoken feelings. And in their convergence, the water, glass, and grass reflect “this lonely afternoon of memories / And missed desires,” even as “the wintry rain / Runs on the standing windows and away.” The physical drama being enacted before him, in other words, becomes a mirror of Nemerov’s heart and mind. It reflects not only the rising, duration, and passing of impermanent mental phenomena but a more enduring emotional state: a prevailing loneliness infused with regret, presumably over something left unsaid and a road not taken.
“Storm Windows” appeared in Nemerov’s 1958 collection of poems, Mirrors and Windows. And here as elsewhere in his collection, the relationship of the perceived external world and the perceiver’s inner life is depicted as fluid and reciprocal. Just as the outer world reflects the mind, so the mind mirrors the external world. In “A Clock with No Hands,” for example, the narrator encounters a clock with Roman numerals and no hands. Rather than treat the clock as a prompt for inner reflection, Nemerov continues to examine it objectively, as might a scientist or physician, noting in his closing lines that behind that vandalized face, the clock’s mechanism “hides in its coiled continuing / A venomous tense past tense.”
To portray the world as a mirror of the human mind, or vice versa, is nothing new. In literary theory the former is known as the “pathetic fallacy”; the latter can be traced to the earliest Buddhist sutras, where the enlightened mind is likened to a limpid pool of water. In alignment with that tradition, the 18th-century Rinzai master Torei Enji, after years of study, concluded that the Japanese word kami, which means “god,” derived from a root meaning “mirror.” Elaborating on Torei’s conclusion, Yamada Mumon Roshi, a 20th-century master, offers this observation:
Before a mirror, rich and poor, powerful and insignificant, men and women, old and young are all perfectly equal . . . A mind that is pure and undefiled, free of contrivances of any kind, impartial and selfless as a mirror—that is the meaning of kami.*
Concentrated, calmed, and refined by years of zazen, this god-like, mirror-like mind reflects the world as it is, without the ego’s interference or habitual distortions. Like an unruffled lake, it shows us the true nature of the things of this world, including our inner worlds of memory and desire, even as it reveals the nature of awareness itself. When this revelation occurs, as Thich Nhat Hanh liked to say, an orange becomes an orange. The ordinary objects in our everyday lives become real and fully present, and so do we.
Howard Nemerov was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1988-1990. To listen to his reading of “Storm Windows,” and to read the full text of the poem, visit www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42695/storm-windows.
* Yamada Mumon Roshi, Hakuin’s Song of Zazen, translated by Norman Waddell (Shambhala, 2024), 63.
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