Wednesday, May 14, 2003

Poem for Wednesday

The Dream Of The Marsh Wren: Reciprocal Creation
By Pattiann Rogers


The marsh wren, furtive and tail-tipped,
by the rapid brown blurs of his movements
makes sense of the complexities of sticks
and rushes. He makes slashes and complicated
lines of his own in mid-air above the marsh
by his flight and the rattles of his incessant
calling. He exists exactly as if he were a product
of the pond and the sky and the blades of light
among the reeds and grasses, as if he were
deliberately willed into being by the empty
spaces he eventually inhabits.

And at night, inside each three-second
shudder of his sporadic sleep, understand
how he creates the vision of the sun
blanched and barred by the diagonal juttings
of the weeds, and then the sun as heavy
cattail crossed and tangled and rooted
deep in the rocking of its own gold water
and then the sun as suns in flat explorsions
at the bases of the tule. Inside the blink
of his eyelids, understand how he composes
the tule dripping sun slowly in gold rain
off its black edges, and how he composes
gold circles widening on the blue surface
of the sun's pond, and the sharp black
slicing of his wing rising against the sun,
and that same black edge skimming the thin
corridor of gold between sky and pond.

Imagine the marsh wren making himself
inside his own dream. Imagine the wren,
created by the marsh, inside the marsh
of his own creation, unaware of his being
inside this dream of mine where I imagine
he dreams within the boundaries of his own
fixed black eye around which this particular
network of glistening weeds and knotted
grasses and slow-dripping gold mist
and seeded winds shifting in waves of sun
turns and tangles and turns itself completely
inside out again here composing me
in the stationary silence of its only existence.

--------

Lionel Luthor is the devil and needs to be written about as such. Nothing would make me happier than for Helen to dump Lex for his father, by the way. It would give me a single reason to find her interesting. Right now I can't think of any.

I'm two for two at HASA and neither's an A/B story! Do I dare send them "Promises and Pledges" or is it too far outside of canon? "Reflections on Absent Men" and "The Stone in the Bed" fit into tiny corners of literary Middle-earth (provided you're willing to accept that Aragorn and Faramir aren't as straight as Tolkien indicated). But P&P has movie-verse all over it. Then again, so do PlasticChevy's stories.

I loathe this man. Israel is not getting one cent of my money even for humanitarian aid until he is voted out of office or his government changes its policies. At least the UJA doesn't send me requests for money every other day, though, the way the ACLU does. Did my entire membership fee go to paying for mailings so they could ask for more money?

My cable is down. Not even flashing that it's trying to connect, but completely dead. This means that no one can call me at present, since I'm using the phone line to dial in, and that I will be very very slow and probably not on AIM until the damn thing gets fixed. Must call Comcast as soon as I'm done posting.

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