Poem for Monday and Minor Disasters

Easter Morning
By Amy Clampitt

a stone at dawn
cold water in the basin
these walls' rough plaster
imageless
after the hammering
of so much insistence
on the need for naming
after the travesties
that passed as faces,
grace: the unction
of sheer nonexistence
upwelling in this
hyacinthine freshet
of the unnamed
the faceless

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Our plan for Easter was to go to Philadelphia for the day to the Picasso exhibit at the art museum and to get ready for a visit to Penn with Daniel on Monday, but my neck was bright red and itching when I got up, so we thought it would probably be wiser to put off that trip to make sure it improved rather than got worse. Then we decided to go to Baltimore for the afternoon instead and try to meet up with Hufflepants -- the conservatory and arboretum, since I'm supposed to stay out of the sun while I'm taking this medicine, which of course had to happen during a glorious sunny weekend instead of a miserable rainy one. Meanwhile, when I booted my brand new Dell computer, it decided to announce that my copy of Windows was not genuine, and wouldn't boot until I jumped through Microsoft's hoops to prove that it was, in fact, authentic.

By then it was after 2 p.m., and Hufflepants wasn't feeling well enough to meet us, so we said let's bail on going to Baltimore and do some necessary shopping instead, like finding Adam a new camera...forgetting that it was Easter Sunday and almost everything would be closed. So after striking out at Ritz, Best Buy, and Target, we figured it was that kind of day and came home, with our only successful stop all afternoon at the food store to get eggs, though we forgot toilet paper which in the grand scheme of things is really more important!

I did get to watch my two necessary Easter movies -- Jesus Christ Superstar, which was, in fact, my first exposure to the Passion story, since I grew up Jewish, and Life of Brian, probably my favorite commentary ever on organized religion. Plus we started watching the UConn women, but then we discovered that there were five fire trucks on the cul de sac across the street and went out to see what was going on (apparently a gas leak that the first truck couldn't track down), and were chatting with neighbors for an hour in the gorgeous night air that for the first time all day made my neck feel better. That, along with the fact that the Eagles are apparently going to trade Donovan McNabb to the Redskins, will have to serve as my good news for the day. Hope everyone in California in the earthquake zone came through unscathed!