Poem for Thursday

Late September
By Charles Simic

The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting,
So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.

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Am meeting for lunch! And having Indian food! And while I'm in NoVa, maybe will go to Terra Christa and get all New Agey. I am hugely tempted to get one of the new miniature Goddess Tarot decks so I can carry it around in my purse for when I need immediate spiritual warm fuzzies. Would this be overly indulgent?

I think Aragorn and Boromir are in a fight. Aragorn is sleeping up in the treehouse-type nest made of twisted branches on the upper level of the cage while Boromir is all curled up in a lonely little ball in the big nest. I feel very badly about this and wonder if it's because I let Boromir see those screen caps of Aragorn kissing Theoden. No wait, it was Viggo kissing Bernard.

Yes, I was up too late last night. Busy with "Similitude" and gratuitous Jack/Stephen M&C smut with because really who can resist and I was hiding from Faramir who was trying to tell me a story I didn't have time to concentrate on yesterday. I swear, let Faramir open his mouth and he's got six months' worth of stories to tell. Mostly raunchy.

How come characters never listen when you remind them that any two people can only have one first time together? How do these people have time to defend their kingdoms, sail the seas, explore strange new worlds, etc.?

And woo hoo! Hate mail before I even got up this morning! I always feel like I wrote a better review if people are pissed off enough to write to me first thing in the morning than if the review gets ignored or I just get the standard "yeah, I agreed." Looking back I said a lot of things very inarticulately and I wish I'd talked more about the cloning and abortion politics implicit in the episode -- I just love fetuses treates as independent human beings when they can be grown in vats of brown liquid with no women in sight!