Poem for Sunday

Echo Near the End
By Bill Knott

Severs and brothers, brokens and sisters, is this it?
Around me life has darkened like the afternoon.
Anymore to emulate the sunlight's posture,
I slither down off that perfect backbone.

I am alone, but so are we. We are alone but so.
Banking slowly the monster completes its turn --
A clingathon of wings flaps through a halo
That holds a weddingring up to a keyhole to

Pen in the one my fear was assisting at
The birth of adrenaline: I pause I postulate.
Wait. A mousehole Morpheus stamps our passport;
Let's hope sleep has the good stuff tonight.

Murder blinks eyes upon eyes. Suicides
Stick to the roof of the mouth, stupid tripod of spit.

--------

From Poet's Choice by Robert Pinsky in The Washington Post Book World. Pinsky calls Knott "eccentric, uneven, brilliant, authentic," and says he writes "as if tired of the flat, all-purpose formal sameness of the lines and structures in so many new books of poetry -- including would-be experimental ones. His new book is The Unsubscriber, published by Farrar Straus Giroux.

Had an insanely busy day...had to get up early for a Saturday to get ready for my younger son's Hebrew school's model seder (this year we only had to bring seder plates, not hard-boil eggs for 40, at least). This was fun, as my mother is a Hebrew school teacher and it's been a family event since my older one started attending the nursery school there nearly 10 years ago. Then we came home, rushed to change and went to the younger son's soccer game (they won again) while older son played at a friend's house. Picked him up on the way back ( was driving, I read to near the end of The Eyre Affair in the car and I am so enjoying that book), got the younger son ready for a Mad Science birthday party where he remained through dinner eating pizza and making slime, took a walk and ate Kraft Macaroni and Cheese with the older son who finished the book he had to read over the weekend. Wrote three Trek articles including mediocre ratings, a promo for an episode I won't see when it airs due to baseball and producer comments on how long Trek will remain dead. Folded three loads of laundry while watching the wonderful last two episodes of The Barchester Chronicles in which Alan Rickman gets to spit the immortal line, "May you both live forever!" and is slapped across the face so hard he falls down...I don't care if he is a greedy sleazeball, I want to tie him up in his chaplain's robes and make him...um, it was a good miniseries and you should watch it.

I also started moving all my fan fiction from various communities into my journal so I can lock the whole thing, then realized there is no way I am going to move all those drabbles and wondered whether I should just delete them since I have them all at The Love Boat anyway. I have had increasing concerns about my kids and their friends being able to find and read this journal as it is; I suppose it would make sense to lock the whole thing, but there are nearly 2000 entries, and with no blanket "friends-lock everything retroactively" command, I can't even imagine the hours it would take to try. It took me days to make everything in 's journal private and there are only 136 entries there! (Note to : YouReadMe will mark you as inactive and remove archived posts if you ask them; I did. Now we just need to find out how many other sites are taking and archiving our journals.)

So I'm back to thinking that it may be easiest simply to delete this journal and start over with one that's locked from the start, though I'm not sure what will happen to any entries of mine that have already been archived from here even if I delete. And the thing is, I'd really like to keep this username, which I have used in multiple fandoms for more than ten years. Does anyone know whether LiveJournal makes names available again after an account has been deleted and purged? Or whether there is a way to dump all content from the journal without my having to delete each entry individually -- to return it to default parameters, as it were? I generally save my entries each day, so I have most of them archived on my hard drive; I will probably lose a great many conversations that occurred in comments but I really can't see how I could manage to lock entry by entry. I suppose conversely I could go back and lock only the entries that contain fan fiction or adult discussions and any mention of family or personal stuff, but even that would be a massive, weeks-long project. I don't even have words for how much I hate LiveJournal right now; I am so, so tempted to switch to blogging at a site that promises no RSS feeds, but I would miss the community here so much.

Again we pause from the England photos to bring you a spring Saturday in the US. Tomorrow I will have relatives from both sides of the family in town, so I will have even less free time than today!


The table set for the Hebrew school model seder. Note that this year we actually got a real shank bone on the seder plate rather than the paper one we had last year because there weren't enough shank bones to go around. Also note that this year they were ridiculously brave and got purple rather than white grape juice; one table inevitably ends up with theirs spilled all over someone's lovely outfit, and thankfully it was not ours. But I must confess that that tilted candle never quite stayed upright in the candleholder, even though we tried to melt it in, and near the end of the seder it tipped over and set the paper tablecloth on fire, requiring us to douse the flames with grape juice. This amused the rabbi in a panicked sort of way.


The ten plagues spilled on the Passover tablecloth. The custom is that a drop of wine is spilled for each of the plagues to reflect our sorrow that the Egyptians had to suffer for the Jews to be free, but all this does is remind me how throughly I do not believe in anything attributed to God in the Bible. God is pissed at Pharaoh so he slays the firstborn of every Egyptian household? The same God who killed every single person and animal on Earth except Noah, his family and his floating zoo? Way to make me a pagan, Mom!


At my son's soccer game. His team wears one shade of blue and the opponents wore another shade of blue, so in the sunlight it was sometimes difficult to tell who had the ball. I was half-watching, half-talking to other parents and sort of trying to sneak peeks at my book, so I missed the finer details of the game, but I do know that we won and that there were Doritos for snack, as my son got the powdered cheese all over his soccer uniform.


The neighbors' yard, with a variety of bright blooming flowers. I love the red, white and blue thing they have going in the hanging basket, and also those very, very red tulips. Naked cupid statuary does not tend to be my thing.


Pink petals, blue sky. These trees are already past their peak, as you can tell from the brown edges of many of the petals; what you can't see in this picture are the hundreds of petals beneath the tree making the sidewalk slippery, though very pretty and shiny.


And here are yellow tulips. The range of colors is just amazing -- we have a very pink tree hanging over our front steps from our neighbor's yard, a bunch of periwinkle in bloom in front of our house, azaleas just starting to peek out, dogwoods coming into full bloom...my nose was even cooperative, though I still seem to be tired, scratchy-throated and a little achy.