Thursday, August 4

woods

On the way there a couple of startled wings fluttered, and that was all. One goes there alone. It is a lofty building made entirely of open spaces, a building which sways all the time, but is never able to fall. The sun, changed into a thousand suns, drifts in through the open slivers. And an inverse law of gravity takes hold in the play of light: this house floats anchored in the sky, and what falls falls upward. It makes you turn around. In the woods it is all right to grieve. It's all right to see the old truths, which we usually keep packed away in the luggage... [There is a] childlike light around the terrifying trophies. Woods are mild that way.

-- Tomas Tranströmer, from "A Place in the Woods"
Translated by Robert Bly