Poem for Tuesday

Learning to Read
By Franz Wright

If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word,
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.

My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, every time I spoke.

My favorite was the Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names,
but when was I going to pronounce them, and

to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English;

two, he had sufficient intent
to smirk or knock me down
without any prompting from me.

Loneliness, boredom and terror
my motivation
fiercely fuelled.

I get down on my knees and thank God for them.

Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.

--------

From this week's New Yorker.

I had a wonderful day with DementorDelta being eccentric! We wanted to go shopping for beads, so we headed to Kentlands in Gaithersburg, where the high-end Bead Attitudes was closed because it was Monday, but the wholesale beads at Kentlands Candles & Gifts were open and ready for perusing. We must have spent an hour in there ogling little glass bats, fish, penguins, pumpkins and dozens of others before we picked out a bunch of little lampwork animals and some spacers and wire. We stopped in Michaels too, but didn't find anything nearly so exciting. Then we went to Moby Dick's House of Kabob for lunch before coming back to my house to make goofy necklaces.


Piglet and Elephant


Giraffe


Fish


Penguin


Frog and Horse


Duck


Giant Panda


Owl and Slug

I made DementorDelta watch some bits of the Lord of the Rings DVDs -- both awesome moments from the films (Aragorn/Boromir by the river in the extended Fellowship, Boromir and Faramir in the extended Two Towers, the lighting of the beacons in The Return of the King) and a bit of the commentary ("It's almost like lovers") and MTV's The Lord of the Piercing and Sam and Frodo from the easter eggs...by this point the kids were home and laughing with us. After homework and dinner we watched more Arrested Development while I folded laundry -- Tobias announcing that he feels like Mary without Peter and Paul when his wife and daughter won't join him in his folk group is one of my favorite TV moments ever. Then Paul put on basketball, but I convinced him to turn it off and put Boiled in Lead on the stereo instead!