Friday, February 01, 2008

Poem for Friday

Eyes Fastened With Pins
By Charles Simic


How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.

--------

I have my son's cold. Grrrrr. I was supposed to have lunch with Heather but between her power problems causing her to be late and my feeling like I might infect her, we decided to postpone. So I stayed in and wrote my review of The Fountain with a cat snoring behind me on the couch, and then when Adam got home, we filled out the papers to enter his science project in the county science fair (because he was one of very few sixth graders from his school chosen to participate, whoo) and discussed the novel he is writing that involves a parent with Alzheimer's and being trapped in a dream.


A smith working with pewter in the copper smithy...


...and the coppersmith working on candlesticks.


This windmill sits in a field full of sheep...


...which I believe are Hog Island sheep, and had recently been sheared.


The Leicester Longwool were in the shade in the snow, and clearly had not been sheared.


This cat was eating outside the harnessmaker -- I hadn't realized they had Fancy Feast in Colonial Williamsburg, I thought the cats caught rats! *g*


But I bet gray squirrels were ubiquitous then as now.


And here is a gratuitous photo of the Greenhow Store sign, so I could have a gratuitous tall ship.


Watched Smallvile, which seems to have jumped the shark in my mind at some point during its long hiatus because I just. did. not. care. Okay, it didn't help that the episode was 85% Lana, very little Chloe and no Lois whatsoever, but I agreed with every mean thing Gabriel said about Lex and every mean thing Bad Clark said about Good Clark. If James Marsters hadn't been in it, I might have turned it off. Then we watched Music and Lyrics on cable, with which I expected to have a love/hate relationship and did -- I loathe romantic comedies and this one is such a Mary Sue story that I almost couldn't sit through it despite the Wham! and Britney parodies -- I love the soundtrack, which I'd heard months ago. But I like Drew Barrymore so I just kind of gritted my teeth through the worst of the dialogue and enjoyed the chemistry; I can't think of another pair of actors who could have pulled this off.

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