Window

I find that there is nothing more beautiful to me than a cat in a window. The cool of spring, the robins bobbing just out of reach, the cat alert. There is an awakening & tension of the senses in the spring that works in odd ways with the exhalation & relief brought by softer times.

This particular cat also likes to sit in front of the tv screen when we are watching. As if the screen were another type of window, which it is. And I say to the cat something my Grandpa Elof used to often say to me as I sat inches from his tv screen, "You make a better door than a window."

And I find myself drawn to the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, one of the many poets I feel should not be read in an academic setting but rather a meditative one. So here are a few tidbits I wish to share with you...

The Half-Made Heaven

Despair breaks its course.

Anxiety breaks its course.

The vulture breaks his flight.

Dazzling light pours forth-

even the ghosts take a gulp.

Our images, red-painted beasts

in the glacial cave, see day.

Everything stares nakedly around.

We walk in the sun by the hundreds.

Each one is a half-open door

that leads to a room for all.

Unfathomable ground under us.

Water glitters between the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

Stones

Stones that we have thrown I hear

falling, glass-clear through the years. In the valley

fly the moment's chaotic

acts shrieking from

treetop to treetop. Made mute

in thinner air than that of the present, they glide

like swallows over mountain

and mountain, until they

reach the farthest plains

at the edges of existence. There fall

all our achievements

glass-clear

to no bottom

except within ourselves.