Windows

This is a sketch I made on the trip to Greece. It shows the pattern of windows 

on part of the Fata Morgana, where we stayed on the lovely uncrowded island of Folegandros.

 I went looking for windows because I wanted to use another picture of ducks on the blog tonight and couldn't allow myself to. Yesterday I discovered a series of window poems by Wendell Berry. There are 27 of them, and they are not brief, like haiku or tanka, or even sonnets, but each one is well developed, and they differ quite a bit in theme and length, while keeping a thread to the idea of a window. Some, like the one below recount personal experience, while others consider larger issues of peace, life and war. I like them a lot, and found that I also had taken many pictures of windows in the past dozen years and uploaded many of them to FLICKR, the photo-saving website. I could probably do a month's blogging just on windows. Here is one of Wendell Berry's window poems.

Window Poems

17.

For a night and a day

his friend stayed here

on his way across the continent,

In the afternoon they walked 

down from Port Royal

to the river, following

for a while the fall of Camp Branch

through the woods,

then crossing the ridge

and entering the woods again

on the valley rim. They talked

of history--men who saw visions

of crops where the woods stood

and stand again, the crops

gone. They ate the cold apples

they carried in their pockets.

They lay on a log in the sun

to rest, looking up

through bare branches at the sky.

They saw a nuthatch walk

in a loop on the side of a tree

in a late patch of light

while below them the Lexington

shoved sand up the river,

her diesels shaking the air.

They walked along trees

across ravines. Now his friend

is back on the bighway, and he sits again

at his window. Another day.

During the night snow fell.

Wendell Berry

New Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2013, page 98.

Another task for myself: use windows or doorways as entrance points into matters that interest me,

or are important to me in some way. Tear out of a magazine or take a picture of a window or door (looking in or looking out) not in my own house and write more than one poem on whatever meditating on this picture suggests. Do the same with a picture of, or framed by, a window in my own dwelling. Compare the results after having written several pieces of each kind.