At the window, briefly

The old man who lives in the big house

overlooking the Bay at the southern end of the road

returns from his walk with his aging Siberian Husky.

There he goes, across my westward line of sight at the window,

holding the leash in his right hand and a small plastic see-

through baggie in his left hand.

The pair walk southward, the direction toward his house,

it appears, after the performance of the husky's necessities,

although he seems to have a few last squirts available for

the madly-sniffed base of a tree and a lesser few for good measure

alongside the lower quarter of a healthy bush.

The old-timer wears dark prescription sunglasses whose lenses

seem the size of teacup saucers, and as thick as two

diner pancakes if placed side by side upon a heavy, utilitarian plate.

His posture is curved forward at the torso which is to be expected,

and his face exhibits an unflinchingly stern expression, also to be expected.

He clutches the neck of the baggie containing the solid remnants of

the morning's imperative, firmly, his forearm running parallel

to the road ahead, bent at the elbow and at a right angle to his torso, although

his posture skews the sharpness of the angle to some degree.

The forearm rocks like a mechanism set

to open and close something repeatedly.

A young woman peddling her bike, zips passed him

going the other way, northbound toward the avenue

with a loud, cheerful “Good morning”! exhaled

from a healthy set of lungs, her fast bike, thin as a whisper,

quickly clicking through one of its 30 gears, and disappears from view. 

Slower-paced, the husky trots ahead,
leaving a little slack in the leash, perhaps out of sympathy,

but otherwise seeming to be uninterested
in the chance meeting between the two human principals.
They too, disappear from the strict parameters of the window,

leaving in place the unoccupied, brilliant late summer landscape.

(This visual phenomenon is known in art circles as closed-form imagery,

in that, intellectually we're aware that what we see within the frame's

structure, has a beginning and an ending, sort-of, neither of which

can actually be seen.)

I was fortunate to have witnessed the moment;

an old man at the portal to an eternity of all things left somewhere else,
and the young woman riding fast into the prime of her being, and
a good-looking Siberian Husky with a pleasant disposition,
cast in a landscape framed exclusively for their 15 second exhibition.

Swansea