View to the North

As you grow older, it gets colder.
You see through things.
I’m looking through the trees,

their torn and thinning leaves,
to where chill blue water
is roughened by the wind.

Day by day the scene opens,
enlarges, rips of space
appear where full branches

used to snug the view.
Soon it will be wide, stripped,
entirely unobstructed:

I’ll see right through
the twining waves, to
the white horizon, to the place

where the North begins.
Magnificent! I’ll be thinking
while my eyeballs freeze.

May Swenson


I certainly hope that the scene will open as I grow older; I think I've experienced some of that already. In fact, it's odd sometimes to think back to my younger self and feel that it was so much smaller, tenser, duller, and tighter than the way I feel today. Oh, I don't mean to put my younger self down - but I sometimes feel sorry for myself twenty or thirty years ago, the way you might feel sorry for a child who is needlessly worried about things that don't matter or don't exist.

There's a real freedom that comes with getting older, for some people at least, I think. But when I was much younger I thought it was the other way round, of course.