Poem for Tuesday

Shells
By Kathleen Raine

Reaching down arm-deep into bright water
I gathered on white sand under waves
Shells, drifted up on beaches where I alone
Inhabit a finite world of years and days.
I reached my arm down a myriad years
To gather treasure from the yester-milliennial sea-floor,
Held in my fingers forms shaped on the day of creation.

Building their beauty in three dimensions
Over which the world recedes away from us,
And in the fourth, that takes away ourselves
From moment to moment and from year to year
From first to last they remain in their continuous present.
The helix revolves like a timeless thought,
Instantaneous from apex to rim
Like a dance whose figure is limpet or murex,
cowrie or golden winkle.

They sleep on the ocean floor like humming-tops
Whose music is the mother-of-pearl octave of the rainbow,
Harmonious shells that whisper forever in our ears,
The world that you inhabit has not yet been created.

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Another domestic day broken up by taking the kids to the pool, going to the post office, and various shopping chores. Both kids wanted to go out to spend the last of their birthday money on video games, since this is the last week they can play them on weekdays before school starts: Daniel wanted Final Fantasy IV, Adam wanted Petz Cats 2 which he apparently thought would be like a cat version of Nintendogs. It wasn't, and he was bitterly disappointed and spent the rest of the afternoon unhappy. I didn't know what to tell him, since I always tell them to check ratings and play demos before they spend their money on games. I'm wondering whether this particular game has glitches in it and that's why he can't make it do the things he thought it did, but I don't know enough about Nintedo DS games to have any idea!


The Air Mobility Command Museum was having a historic car, truck and cycle show when we visited last weekend.


Here, from the window of the C-141B Starlifter, is a view of some of the planes and other vehicles on display.


This is Lockheed's Hercules, built in the 1950s.


The outside of Hangar 1301, built in 1944 as the headquarters for the 4146th Base Unit for secret rocket testing...


...now the permanent home of the Air Mobility Command Museum, which keeps its most painstakingly restored planes inside.


Here's a view from the upper catwalk, which has a display on refueling in flight. The big plane in the foreground is a C-47, with a B-17 in the back.


Here's a yummy World War II paratrooper's dinner: SPAM, crackers, a Hershey bar, gum, and cigarettes. I'm surprised none of the men got scurvy.


The working airfields of Dover AFB are just beyond the museum.

I'm completely oversaturated on the Olympics -- we all are -- so in the evening we watched Deja Vu on On Demand, which was a much better movie than I was expecting...I'm not sure why I didn't expect to like it so much, considering it's a great cast and a neat sci-fi hook. I howled when they were first trying to send a message into the past and one of the tech guys yelled, "I need more cowbell!" And I liked the resolution of the obvious conundrum (the fact of two Denzel Washingtons in the past), but I'm completely mystified why, when he realized he couldn't go to the police with information from the future, he didn't call in an anonymous bomb threat, which should have been sufficient to get the ferry evacuated an hour before its launch!

I am worried, though, about the sea turtles that wandered into a restaurant and the baby whale that tried to bond with a yacht after its mother apparently abandoned it. At least there is good news for penguins who want to be knights.