[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])
[Read more…]