By Mark Doty
The little goats like my mouth and fingers,
and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence board
a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field,
pushes her mouth forward to my mouth,
so that I can see the smallish squared seeds of her teeth, and the bristle-whiskers,
and then she kisses me, though I know it doesn't mean "kiss,"
then leans her head way back, arcing her spine, goat yoga,
all pleasure and greeting and then good-natured indifference: she loves me,
she likes me a lot, she takes interest in me, she doesn't know me at all
or need to, having thus acknowledged me. Though I am all happiness,
since I have been welcomed by the field's small envoy, and the splayed hoof,
fragrant with soil, has rested on the fence board beside my hand.
--------
From this week's New Yorker.
I had a delightful if uneventful Imbolc/Feast of Brigid/Candlemas/Groundhog Day -- in fact, I did not leave the house. I saw the bad news early from Punxsutawney Phil, before I looked up the Oscar nominations, in fact (and I will confess that, while I will root for Avatar to win Best Picture, it's fine with me if Bigelow wins Best Director or even Tarantino -- I just don't want George Clooney's latest male mid-life crisis drama to win). My day consisted of excitement such as working on moving the entirety of a fic archive to archiveofourown.org, which means getting codes and doing imports for several other writers; emptying and reloading the dishwasher; and finally getting the laundry folded, which I did while watching The Graduate on TCM. I've seen it many, many times, and even wrote a paper on it for a grad school seminar on film and popular music, but I never really focused before on Anne Bancroft's cougar-print clothes, hee. Since those of you who are long-time readers of this journal know that I love groundhogs, here is a small celebration of them:
Paul loves finding recipes to celebrate various holidays even if they're holidays that we don't celebrate personally, so while I would gladly have settled for cheese, winter squash and poppyseed muffins for Imbolc, I certainly wasn't going to complain when he announced that he was making crepes with ratatouille for La Chandeleur. (He made them with yellow squash, so I got my winter squash anyway.) Then Adam decided we should watch Ratatouille since we'd eaten it and he and Daniel had finished their homework. While we did that, Paul made chocolate crepes for dessert, since he was on a roll making crepes -- a recipe from Cooking Light, meaning they only had way too many calories instead of way, way, way too many calories -- not that that stopped me from having two of them. Hail Brigid!
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