Poem for Saturday

Dolor of Autumn
By D.H. Lawrence

The acrid scents of autumn,
Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear
Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn
And the snore of the night in my ear.

For suddenly, flush-fallen,
All my life, in a rush
Of shedding away, has left me
Naked, exposed on the bush.

I, on the bush of the globe,
Like a newly-naked berry, shrink
Disclosed: but I also am prowling
As well in the scents that slink

Abroad: I in this naked berry
Of flesh that stands dismayed on the bush;
And I in the stealthy, brindled odours
Prowling about the lush

And acrid night of autumn;
My soul, along with the rout,
Rank and treacherous, prowling,
Disseminated out.

For the night, with a great breath intaken,
Has taken my spirit outside
Me, till I reel with disseminated consciousness,
Like a man who has died.

At the same time I stand exposed
Here on the bush of the globe,
A newly-naked berry of flesh
For the stars to probe.

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My morning was chaos. Somehow I managed to save revised documents as temporary files instead of writing over the originals, and when I closed them, I lost all the revisions. So I posted fic with only the barest beta repairs rather than the substantial rewriting I'd done, and I posted a review of "The Galileo Seven" that may not even be coherent, let alone deep. Sigh. I am still not sure how I did this; I thought the review would have saved on the disk on which I transferred it from the laptop. I looked through all of my temporary files but can't figure out what name the version I was saving might be -- some random series of letters and numbers, and sorting by date didn't help. With MSWord I can always find the incremental revisions but stupidly I was using WordPad. Never again -- next time everything gets saved under new names in MSWord on the desktop!

After fighting to recover these documents and failing, I blew out to have lunch with , which was the highlight of my day -- Indian food and catching up! Then I came home, finished working, picked up the kids, did some writing for fun and went to take older son to his Hebrew School overnight. Then we went for dinner with my parents, came home to feed the cats and stuck some football game on (I was editing stuff and not paying attention.) A few hours later we got a phone call that older son was melting down -- he claimed he didn't realize the overnight was OVERNIGHT. What did he think the sleeping bag and pillow were for? I am sympathetic, as you couldn't have paid me to go on overnights at this particular synagogue with its wealthy princesses when I was his age, but the school itself is excellent and this overnight is part of the required curriculum. Apparently his best friend in the program got picked up early and that set him off. In theory he is asleep now...

Saturday after we pick him up, younger son has soccer, than a birthday party, then another birthday party (soccer will make him late to the first and the first party will make him late to the second!) So I will be having a hectic but unexciting day. Sunday both kids have their first official morning of Hebrew school for the term and then soccer practice is at four, meaning we have maybe three hours to go do something outdoors. Here's hoping we come up with something relaxing.


The giraffes.


The cranes.


The rhinos.


The storks.


The otters.


The vultures.


The lemurs.