2 miles
river road, south/edmund, north
29 degrees
75% super-slick snow
This doesn’t happen often, but today was not a good day to go out for a run. Maybe I would have enjoyed it if I had worn my yaktrax, but I didn’t. So slippery and difficult to move. A cold wind. Even so, by the end of it I was wishing I would have stayed out there a little longer; I was just getting warmed up!
10 Things
- a gray sky
- gray paths — the dark pavement visible through the slushy snow
- a cold wind in my face
- some dark brownish red dirt sprinkled on one small stretch of the trail
- a runner approaching, taking very small steps
- the river road, snow and ice free
- the bench near folwell, empty
- a few headlights
- a lumbering, noisy truck
- still no poem on the windows of the house on edmund
windows
Yesterday I did the tedious work of searching for “window” in my log entries — 12 pages of entries. Then I tagged the relevant ones with “windows.” Last night and this morning, I’ve been looking through those tagged entries for lines of poetry that use the image of a window — 19 pages / 181 entries. It is time-consuming, but rewarding to be immersed in windows and to have the chance to think more about how the word/idea/image is used in poetry.
I hope to have more to write later, but for now, here are a few thoughts:
- things viewed from the window most often: trees and birds and weather
- often things press against the window, sometimes they rattle them — sometimes they press from the outside — the heat, the cold, the green, and sometimes from the inside — children’s faces against the glass
- windows separate us from the world
- a common cry: open the windows!
- sometimes the window is one of many images, sometimes the whole poem is built around it
- some poets write window, others like windowpane
- a favorite part of the window: windowsill
- sometimes included with window: blinds, curtains, shades
- window as line/bar between inner and outer
- window as distorted or makeshift mirror
- whether the window is dark or lit matters, makes a difference in image meaning — we can see through dark windows, while lit windows reflect back
- sometimes windows are openings, sometimes they’re barriers
- enclosing and disclosing — concealing (or keep safe) or revealing
- more poems want you to open the windows than shut them
- window as access to the soul, the spark of life within
- window as word, as language
- the divide between the domestic space and the world — private/public
- the window as opportunity to stop thinking and just be — look out the window with me
- some birds notice the windows, others don’t — this noticing can be a mistaken belief that there’s another bird on the other side
- some birds notice us on the other side of the window, others don’t and are just observed
Wow, this is fun!
Here’s a window poem for today:
11/ Lao-tzu
Translated from the Chinese by Red Pine
Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it’s the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay
but it’s the hollow
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house
but it’s the spaces
that make a house work
existence makes a thing useful
but nonexistence makes it work
SUNG CH’ANG-HSING says, “In this verse the Great Sage teaches us to understand the source by using what we find at hand. Doors refer to a persons mouth and nose. Windows refer to their ears and eyes.”
I love this idea of doors as breath and windows as attention!
one more thing about windows:
Sitting at my desk in front of my window just now, I suddenly felt something heavy lifting. Then I realized that the sun had finally, after several days of hiding behind clouds, appeared. Of course it’s gone again, but it was there in my window for a moment, I swear.