December 3, 2024: "Osprey," Splintered the Clouds, Wonder and Astonishment

I saw something beautiful this morning.  After several days of gray skies and heavy snow, the clouds opened up, and the sun splintered the clouds with light.  

Billy Collins goes birdwatching . . . 

Osprey

by: Billy Collins

Oh, large brown, thickly feathered creature
with a distinctive white head,
you, perched on the top branch
of a tree near the lake shore,

as soon as I guide this boat back to the dock
and walk up the grassy path to the house,
before I unzip my windbreaker
and lift the binoculars from around my neck,

before I wash the gasoline from my hands,
before I tell anyone I'm back,
and before I hang the ignition key on its nail,
or pour myself a drink—

I'm thinking a vodka soda with lemon—
I will look you up in my
illustrated guide to North American birds
and I promise I will learn what you are called.

Poets are always on the lookout for wonder and astonishment, be it an osprey or snail or marshmallow or sunrise.  If wonder and astonishment are in short supply, then it's the poet's job to hunt them down, wherever they can be found.

As the faithful disciples of this blog (and there are at least two) know, I've been more than a little preoccupied with darkness since Thanksgiving night.  Not by choice, mind you.  Nobody would volunteer to be sad all day and night.  To wake up at 2 a.m. and cry for an hour or so.  

So, this morning, I watched the sun rise over Lake Superior after I dropped my son off at school and my wife at work.  I do this frequently at the library, since I have access to the roof of the building.  In the spring and autumn, it's a glorious way to start a day.  It allows light into the deepest corners of the heart.  In the winter, it's a different experience.  Still beautiful, but coupled with an aching cold.  

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I was able to embrace beauty today, despite freezing my ass off.  Unlike Collins, I didn't need to look up the name of anything.  No osprey to identify.  It was just me.  The cold.  The lake.  And the sun.  

For those few, brief, shining moments, Saint Marty was flooded with wonder.

September 27: Time Window, Worry About Tomorrow, Shades Drawn

People drifted away now, seeing the color return to Billy's cheeks, seeing him smile.  Valencia stayed with him, and Kilgore Trout, who had been on the fringe of the crowd, came closer, interested, shrewd.

"You looked as though you'd seen a ghost," said Valencia.

"No," said Billy.  He hadn't seen anything but what was really before him--the faces of the four singers, those four ordinary men, cow-eyed and mindless and anguished as they went from sweetness to sourness to sweetness again.

"Can I make a guess?" said Kilgore Trout.  "You saw through a time window."

"A what?" said Valencia.

"He suddenly saw the past or the future.  Am I right?"

"No," said Billy Pilgrim.  He got up, put a hand into his picket, found the box containing the ring in there.  He took out the box, gave it absently to Valencia.  He had meant to give it to her at the end of the song, while everybody was watching.  Only Kilgore Trout was there to see. 

"For me?" said Valencia.

"Yes."

"Oh, my God," she said.  Then she said it louder, so other people heard.  They gathered around, and she opened it, and she almost screamed when she saw the sapphire with a star in it.  "Oh, my God," she said.  She gave Billy a big kiss.  She said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Time window.  I'm sitting in my office at the university right now, and I would give my left testicle for a window of any kind right now.  I'm staring at four, cream-colored walls.  There's not a whole lot of distraction, and I sort of like it that way.  It makes it easier to concentrate on blog posts or reading or grading.

I have plenty of time windows in this office, though.  It doesn't take much to get me to stare into some pane of the past.  For instance, just a moment ago, I was thinking about the day after the birth of my son.  I taught a class of freshman composition, and I showed pictures of my newborn.  The teenage girls "awwed" and "oooohed."  The teenage guys kind of rolled their eyes, and I think one of them asked, "Does this mean you're going to push back the due date of the paper?"

My window into the future is kind of limited at the moment.  All I see is myself, in about five hours, leaving campus, exhausted and hungry.  I also see myself freezing my ass off at a football game this Friday night.  Aside from that, I got nothing.  Future windows are always foggier than past windows.

Some people would probably say that gazing through times windows is a waste of time.  It either makes you sad and nostalgic, or fearful and anxious.  In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, "So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries.  Today's trouble is enough for today."  Translation:  no time windows for you.  It's good advice, from a pretty good source.

So, I'm going to try to keep my shades drawn on time windows for the rest of the afternoon and evening.  I'm just going to focus on the next moment, which involves a chicken sandwich and paper grading.

Or maybe Saint Marty should plan out his life for the next five years, instead.