Life Goes On (As Long As You’ve Got a Window)

[Image gallery: a random selection of two dozen stills captured from the wonderful WindowSwap Web site. People from around the world submit ten-minute videos (with sound) of the view outside their homes’ windows; the site simply displays the videos, with very basic captioning information — “[Name]’s Window” at the top left, and the location at top right — in random order. You can’t search or otherwise control the sequence or view of the videos, which play in a full-screen window of their own. And yes, I’ve submitted one outside our own back window, but as far as I can tell (there are hundreds of locations!), it hasn’t been uploaded to WindowSwap as of today.]

From whiskey river:

Riverkeeper

Wanting to be that place where inner
and outer meet, this morning
I’m listening to the river inside—
also to the river out the window, river
of sun and branch shadow, muskrat
and mallard, heron, and the rattled cry
of the kingfisher. Out there is a tree
whose roots the river has washed so often
the tree stretches beyond itself, its spirit
like mine, leaning out over the water, held
only by the poised astonishment
of being here. This morning, listening
to the river inside, I’m sinking into a stillness
where what can’t be said stirs beneath
currents of image and memory, below strata
of muons and quarks, now rushes, now hushes
and pools, now casts a net of bright light
so loosely woven there’s a constellation
afloat on the surface of the river, so still
I can almost hear it weave in and out—
interstellar, intercellular—and isn’t it
truly all one, one world, no in or out, no here
or there, seamless, as a lily about to open
from just here into everywhere, is. Just is.
Restful lily. Lucky lily. To bloom must feel
like a river’s brightening at daybreak,
or a slow kiss, a throb in the elapse of time,
a shudder of heron shadow flying over
shallows that are merely the apparent
skim of a depth whose bottomless surface
seeps everywhere, bloom and retraction,
an anchored flow that upholds city
and cathedral, bridge and gate,
Orion, odd toad in the Amazon, blue dragonfly,
what it is to love . . . Spoil a river, you spoil all this.

(Margaret Gibson [source])

…and:

You forget that your life is a short window, that you are stuck in the present, forget how your life is still here, waiting for you, wondering where you are, going on without you. You forget that people know who you are, think about you, might even be happy to see you.

(Charles Yu [source])

…and:

Grace Notes

If a sparrow dies in flight, the sky
turns inside out accepting it.
A feather may drift about for days
to mark a moving plot
with the thin blade of a name.
But no sparrow falls.

Deeply prescient, sparrows cup their seeds
in fragile domes hollow as heavens.
In time the skies crack
and grow wide with fledglings.
Winged like eighth notes,
they hold in hollowed bones
space enough for a grave
should grace prove too slow.

(Marjorie Stelmach [source: nothing canonical; a Google search turns up a half-dozen references to it, but the whole poem appears to be only on whiskey river for now])

Not from whiskey river:

Special Problems in Vocabulary

There is no single particular noun
for the way a friendship,
stretched over time, grows thin,
then one day snaps with a popping sound.

No verb for accidentally
breaking a thing
while trying to get it open
 —a marriage, for example.

No particular phrase for
losing a book
in the middle of reading it,
and therefore never learning the end.

There is no expression, in English, at least,
for avoiding the sight
of your own body in the mirror,
for disliking the touch

of the afternoon sun,
for walking into the flatlands and dust
that stretch out before you
after your adventures are done.

No adjective for gradually speaking less and less,
because you have stopped being able
to say the one thing that would
break your life loose from its grip.

Certainly no name that one can imagine
for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window,
in spade-shaped leaves

spinning on their stems,
working themselves into
a pale-green, vegetable blur.

No word for waking up one morning
and looking around,
because the mysterious spirit

that drives all things
seems to have returned,
and is on your side again.

(Tony Hoagland [source])

…and:

My Dog Practices Geometry

I do not understand the poets who tell me
that I should not personify. Every morning
the willow auditions for a new role

outside my bedroom window — today she is
Clytemnestra; yesterday a Southern Belle,
lost in her own melodrama, sinking on her skirts.

Nor do I like the mathematicians who tell me
I cannot say, “The zinnias are counting on their
fingers,” or “The dog is practicing her geometry,”

even though every day I watch her using
the yard’s big maple as the apex of a triangle
from which she bisects the circumference

of the lawn until she finds the place where
the rabbit has escaped, or the squirrel upped
the ante by climbing into a new Euclidian plane.

She stumbles across the lawn, eyes pulling
her feet along, gaze fixed on a rodent working
the maze of the oak as if it were his own invention,

her feet tangling in the roots of trees, and tripping,
yes, even over themselves, until I go out to assist,
by pointing at the squirrel, and repeating, “There!

There!” But instead of following my outstretched
arm to the crown of the tree, where the animal is
now lounging under a canopy of leaves,

catching its breath, charting its next escape,
she looks to my mouth, eager to read my lips,
confident that I — who can bring her home

from across the field with a word, who
can speak for the willow and the zinnia —
can surely charm a squirrel down from a tree.

(Cathryn Essinger [source])

…and:

#101: Your instructions: turn off the sound from any electronic devices such as televisions, stereos, smartphones. Set a timer for ten minutes, then go to the nearest window, open it if possible, sit beside it, and look outside. Do not talk to anyone else. Do not read or consult your phone. Do not watch the timer, and do not get up before it goes off. (If you are interrupted, wait until you can reset the timer, and then begin again. )

Now: just… look.

Outside the window.

See? There. Just sit, and look.

When the timer sounds, shut it off. Resume your day, or sit a while longer if you want.

You know, you probably will never forget this ten-minute experience, even if “nothing happens”; your memory of it will return at the slightest hint — the word timer perhaps, or the sound of birdsong or traffic, or (ha!) the phrase “maxims for nostalgists.”

Now consider: why might this be so? Why might you remember this ten minutes? What might this say about your window, about your memory in general, about nostalgia?

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)