Poem for Wednesday

The Bearhug
By Nick Laird

It’s not as if I’m intending on spending the rest of my life
doing this:
besuited, rebooted, filing to work, this poem a fishbone in
my briefcase.
The scaffolding clinging St Paul’s is less urban ivy than
skin, peeling off.

A singular sprinkler shaking his head spits at the newsprint
of birdshit.
It’s going unread: Gooseberry Poptarts, stale wheaten
bread, Nutella and toothpaste.
An open-armed crane turns to embrace the aeroplanes
passing above.

I hadn’t the foggiest notion. Imagine: me, munching
cardboard and rubbish,
but that’s just what they meant when they said, Come in,
you’re dead-beat,
take the weight off your paws, you’re a big weary grizzly
with a hook through his mouth,

here, have some of this love.

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The big activity of my day was rearranging CDs because I couldn't get to a Loreena McKennitt CD when I wanted it, even though it was actually on the big CD rack in alphabetical order with the rest of her CDs; the lower shelves are unnavigable at this point due to husband's pack rat music-collecting tendencies, so I yanked what I wanted to move to higher shelves, then had to repack the lower shelves, and one of the shelves collapsed off its dowels and had to be remounted, and things just generally went downhill from there. So, yeah, there went the morning. Then I had lunch with at Tara Thai and we walked around the lake to see the baby geese (two families munching the grass by the hotels and then another family I did not see with my kids over the weekend with two tiny little fluffy babies).

When I came home to get my kids, I decided I needed to make my own Celtic Woman II CD with Loreena and Enya and Maire and Méav and a little gratuitous Lisa Moscatiello because it's not her fault that she was born Italian-American. Then I remembered that I never burned the Annie Haslam song Jennifer Cutting wrote for a charity fundraiser for local hunger and did that, and by the time I was done playing with music I realized I had better write my Trek news or I wouldn't get it done, so I did that (slooow news day -- Sternbach talking about starship design and couple in Alaska who named their son James Tiberius Kirk). And then it was practically dinnertime.

As for where the evening went, there were books to be returned at the library and then books on travel in France to be flipped through and older son had to read all the Star Trek cartoons from Bloom County aloud and younger son was making penguin puppets for a drama show at school where they picked five student plays out of everyone's to do and his was one of the five (and, naturally, is about penguins!). got me the first season of Boston Legal on DVD, which pleases me greatly! And at Best Buy, so it came with the bonus disc with the last four episodes of The Practice with Shatner! And that is about all the excitement!


The United States Marine Corps War Memorial...


...aka Iwo Jima.


Here, with Rosslyn, Virginia in the background.


And here facing the park from the rear.