Windows

Sierra grabbed the camera the other day and took a plethora of pictures. My favorites are the above self-portrait, Kaia's swanky walk, and my wonderful bedroom windows. Which made me think I needed to add a poem about windows.



Windows by Charles Baudelaire

Looking from outside into an open window
one never sees as much as when one looks
through a closed window. There is nothing more profound,
more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling
than a window lighted by a single candle.
What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting
than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous
square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Across the ocean of roofs I can see a middle-aged woman,
her face already lined, who is forever bending over
something and who never goes out. Out of her face, her dress,
and her gestures, out of practically nothing at all, I have made
up this woman's story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it
to myself and weep.

If it had been an old man I could have made up his just as well.

And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have suffered in
some one besides myself.

Perhaps you will say "Are you sure that your story is
really the one?" But what does it matter what reality is
outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am,
and what I am?