Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Poem for Tuesday and Little Reptiles

Twenty Questions
By Jim Moore

Did I forget to look at the sky this morning
when I first woke up? Did I miss the willow tree?
The white gravel road that goes up from the cemetery,
but to where? And the abandoned house on the hill, did it get
even a moment? Did I notice the small clouds so slowly
moving away? And did I think of the right hand
of God? What if it is a slow cloud descending
on earth as rain? As snow? As shade? Don't you think
I should move on to the mop? How it just sits there, too often
unused? And the stolen rose on its stem?
Why would I write a poem without one?
Wouldn't it be wrong not to mention joy? Sadness,
its sleepy-eyed twin? If I'd caught the boat
to Mykonos that time when I was nineteen
would the moon have risen out of the sea
and shone on my life so clearly
I would have loved it
just as it was? Is the boat
still in the harbor, pointing
in the direction of the open sea? Am I
still nineteen? Going in or going out,
can I let the tide make of me
what it must? Did I already ask that?

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We had a fairly quiet President's Day, since it was cold and Adam's foot is still sore enough that he didn't feel like doing much walking. I did some reading in the morning. We had lunch together -- Adam was teaching himself to make banana ice cream and peanut butter cups with whey protein -- then Paul and I went out to do a bunch of shopping, including the food store, the pottery store where the decorated animals made by Adam and Maddy last weekend were ready to be picked up, and the pet store for kitty litter, where I stopped to admire the reptiles:

















Evening was fairly uneventful as well, since laundry day and garbage day have both been delayed a day due to the holiday. We watched this week's Dallas, during which J.R.'s awesome scene with Sue Ellen made me very nostalgic and so sad that there won't be any more, then the UConn-Baylor women's game, which I didn't care about much but my father-in-law had been awaiting as a highlight of his birthday -- whether he feels the same now that UConn has lost, I don't know. The most presidential thing I did was to admire photos of the Washington Nationals mascots as they reached Mount Rushmore!

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