Poem for Sunday and Huntley Meadows

The Place Where in the End / We Find Our Happiness
By Anne Boyer

The history of revolutions is the history of vague ideas,
Shrugging shoulders, not shrugging shoulders,
Standing around, acting without thinking,
Acting with thinking, being penned or penning,

Being a woman or a girl standing around,
A woman or a girl with some flour in her pocket
    for tossing up a cloud of flour
         to obscure the martial men's sight.

That white cloud of whatever
Among the moving and unmoving bodies
Is that history-like unhistory
        of the ahistorical average,
That lovely inexact and provisional something—
                         weaponized or never.

How totally under-theorized is breathing,
Walking and not walking,
Wanting to have a good time or just having it,
Like everybody is gunning toward Eden
     and nobody is in school with their bodies anymore.

The history of revolutions is a history of the orthodox
     weeping over their faltering
                     orthodoxies:

Any precise thing—dumb these days:
The very idea imprinting nothing
        on the air between the general buildings.

No human space—a printer's paper.
Nothing exact—impressed.

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Both my kids slept very late on Saturday -- Daniel even later than Adam, who woke up feeling well enough to go out for a while. So after lunch we picked up his girlfriend and went to Huntley Meadows, where it was gorgeous -- around 50 degrees, brilliant sunshine, very few people -- and we saw many animals, including at least two species of turtles, herons and an egret, geese, red-winged blackbirds, and a swimming muskrat. We also saw several beaver lodges and heard many, many frogs, but the animals were hiding.

















We had a breakfast-for-dinner day -- eggs, French toast, veggie sausage -- and watched Game Change, the Sarah Palin movie, on HBO. I thought the film was awfully willing to let McCain off the hook (all mistakes are attributed to his advisers) and pretty sympathetic to Palin though it made her look much weaker as a person than we ever saw in public (again, well-intentioned but foolish advisers get blamed) -- it was mostly enjoyable to see Julianne Moore and Ed Harris try to capture the candidates, which I thought they did better in big speech moments than the homier scenes.