Poem for Thursday

So, So It Begins Means It Begins
By Mary Jo Bang

And so it begins, Mickey, birthday cake (party), special
Night, whoops, and take a box.
So it begins, take a bow, hold your head up,
Scowl now. This is your own guitar.

Stop and see a movie.
Stop and see whether the eagle holds up at the end.
I'm leaving. See how I pull the door to.
The door is the floor and it's rising up,

Below is a dungeon. It's all you can see in the dark.
There is graffiti on the wall.
The bugle has ceded its call to power.
It's the time when we are waiting to be told.

Nothing is getting better. And nothing is getting worse.
A duck and a mouse. A house and a hat.
Having lunch and having a medal of honor.
Let's put our culture on a cartoon's.

Why not? Have the mouse answer the phone.
Have the receiver click. Then the real comes to
Its awful end. That point where, as he said, all came in
"With the shoutmost shoviality. Agog" Agog.

--------

From this week's New Yorker.

I did laundry for most of the morning, wrote cover letters for a couple of jobs I won't get because I know how many other people are applying, and tried to catch up on correspondence, which I did pretty well except for over 50 journal comments. When Adam got home from school, I took him to his Bar Mitzvah tutor, then we went to the violin shop because his orchestra teacher said he thought son was ready for a full-size instrument. We have a rent-to-buy plan, so he tried a couple, picked one, then we had it restrung with better strings, got new rosin and full-size shoulder rest, plus some music (he wanted "Ashokan Farewell," which I love).


A Trident Maple, age unknown, with its roots growing spectacularly over rocks, now trained at the National Arboretum.


Another Trident Maple, about to bud, seemingly suspended over its roots.


Higo, a Japanese Camellia being trained by Nippon Bonsai growers since 1876.


A 70-year-old Japanese Maple, donated to the arboretum by Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi.


Here is a close-up of the beautiful miniature leaves.


A diminutive Toringo Crabapple tree in training since 1905. I've seen this tree late in summer when it bore fruit.


A Chinese Quince in training since 1875.


A Prostrate Juniper, trained since 1969.

PBS was showing the Trevor Nunn-directed King Lear with Ian McKellen, which was fantastic (though completely wrenching and hard to watch at times). I knew Romola Garai played Cordelia, but I hadn't paid enough attention to the stage production to realize that both Sylvester McCoy and Philip Winchester were in it. I've adored Winchester since the first episode of Crusoe and it was a lot of fun to see him play a conniving villain who has much in common with the adversary from that show. As for McCoy, we were joking at the beginning that the video quality looked like 1970s Doctor Who, so it seemed only fitting to have a Doctor turn up (we've only seen him at the start of the Eighth Doctor movie, so we had a moment of "Who IS that?" before we realized and laughed).