Poem for Tuesday

Last Call
By Randall Mann

A giant bird-
of-paradise
has climbed the bar:
in this paradise

there are no flowers,
no flowers at all.
When Happy Hour
becomes Last Call—

Adam in drag
our royalty—
we buy her gin
for eternity

(an unseen deejay
scores the years
with pulsing music
of the spheres).

Now the queen has gone,
gone again
in search of love,
in search of sin.

It’s closing time.
You were not at fault.
I drain my glass
and lick the salt.

--------

It was a generally sucky Monday -- rained all day and was dark and chilly for starters, but on top of that, my computer gave me lots of grief that prevented me from printing my holiday address labels (I have finally uninstalled McAfee and installed AVG, but that only makes it marginally faster; I think it doesn't have enough memory to run Firefox and MS Word at the same time, period, and it would cost almost as much to get more memory as it would to replace the computer, but I'm nervous about getting a new Windows system before the bugs are semi-worked out and I don't have a version of Photoshop I can run on a Mac). Then the kids came home and needed things printed out -- my computer is the only one currently hooked up to a working printer -- and while I was fighting with that, Paul called from a local gas station to tell me that the van had started smoking as he was driving home from work, and he pulled in there and was going to have to leave it overnight. One more problem (and expense) we don't need.


The injured eagle who is a permanent resident at Meadowside Nature Center.


It was an overcast afternoon near Rock Creek Park last Friday...


...though the sun peeked out as we reached Lake Frank.


This is one of the reconstructed cabins in the pioneer homestead area.


Adam paused for a rest beside the student-built covered bridge.


The park contains the ruins of old farm enclosures in the woods, as well as the remains of Muncaster Mill.


The Founder's Grove borders the educational area where there are buildings for scientific research and outdoor ed.


Many deer live in Rock Creek Park. Sometimes they wander right up to the nature center hoping for leftovers from the bird and squirrel feeders.

I liked Heroes, because I still like the Petrellis and the Bennets -- well, I don't always like the former so much but I vastly prefer pathetic Nathan to selfish bastard Nathan, and we've had more of the former than the latter lately. Spoilers: I just wish they hadn't already killed and brought back so many people; what should have been a very moving moment between Nathan and Peter was hard for me to take seriously, because we all know Nathan will reappear during May sweeps if the producers decide they need him. I also really thought that Angela deserved to be there -- she was the one who kept Nathan alive for so long, no matter how warped that might have been. As for Claire, I understand why the carnival would seem vastly preferable to college, but she's being ridiculously naive yet again not to wonder about the hidden agenda -- someone intimately connected with these people killed her first roommate and tried to kill Gretchen more than once. We watched the New Orleans-New England game between Heroes and Jon Stewart -- I am so glad he and Colbert are back! The segment on emigrating to Mexico had me howling. Now Colbert is ranting about the fact that news happens so rudely while he's away...