Inside another eatery

Lately I have found that snapshots inside pizza parlors or such places work beautifully with the app TangledFX and its black and white etching filter. I guess it is something about the chairs. This place is called Mancino's; it's in downtown Petoskey, Michigan.

Right now, the sun has just gone down just outside the big windows overlooking the meadow; the sky is suffused with that rosy glow. The opera channel is playing on satellite radio. All and all, a mellow evening.

I got out the Transtromer again today, and took it to bed with this cold. The book made me very happy, and it has been hard to pick just one for tonight.

[I just picked one, talked about it, and finished typing it when the laptop decided to do a Windows update, without any warning! and I lost all but the paragraph above. Can't overdo the crabbiness I felt, but here I am back for the re-do.]

The poem I have chosen in TRACKS by Tomas Transtromer, one of my favorite poets. It is on page 34 in The Great Enigma; new collected poems, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton.

TRACKS

2 AM: moonlight. The train has stopped

out in thw middle of the plain. Far away, points of light in a town, 

flickering coldly on the horizon.

As when someone has fallen into a dream so deep
he'll never remember having been there
when he comes back to his room.

As when someone has fallen into an illness so deep
everything his days were becomes a few flickering points, a swarm,
cold and tiny on the horizon,

The train is standing quite still.
2 AM: bright moon light, few stars.

---Tomas Transtromer

This is also, for me, a Memory Thread, since this was one of the three poems Robert Hass brought to our seminar to introduce us to the work of Transtromer. More than 30 years ago!!! I have loved the sensible and mysterious work of the Swedish poet ever since, and am glad to back here tonight. Sleep Well!