After a Death
By Tomas Tranströmer
Translated by Robert Bly
Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.
One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
--------
Tranströmer has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I will keep this short so as not to whine about my eye or LiveJournal's ongoing temper tantrums. It was not a bad day other than those frustrations; I did some work, called the high school attendance office to find out why we got both e-mail and a phone call telling us that Adam missed classes yesterday when he was in school all day -- turned out it was a glitch from the cross country meet the day before, when the team was excused for the afternoon to go to the meet -- and went out to get shampoo and other exciting necessities.
Then I went to meet
gblvr for a delayed dinner at the mall, where we checked out the new Brighton breast cancer bracelet (but didn't buy it because I am practicing fiscal restraint) and used our Bath & Body Works coupons for free stuff before coming back to my house, because I had won an enormous Bath & Body Works Eiffel Tower in a Twitter giveaway, which I expected to be about a foot high but turned out to be about five feet high, so I donated it to her new home. Here are the photos from the Maryland Renfaire market that I couldn't post last night:
