One Looks at One

For some reason, I've been thinking today about this photo I snapped as surreptitiously as I could while we were in Tunisia this past summer.  I looked at her, and she looked at me.  Such different worlds -- me from my American life and she in her North African muslim life.  But there was something about her, the way she stood with her arms crossed and attitude on her face, that I quite liked.

Somehow, it makes me think of these lines from Robert Frost's "Two Look at Two":

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.


She saw me in my field, and I her in hers.