Saturday, April 25, 2015

Poem for Saturday, Longwood Gardens, Time and Again

Trans-
By Rita Dove

I work a lot and live far less than I could,
but the moon is beautiful and there are
blue stars . . . . I live the chaste song of my heart.

— Garcia Lorca to Emilia Llanos Medinor,
November 25, 1920

The moon is in doubt
over whether to be
a man or a woman.

There’ve been rumors,
all manner of allegations,
bold claims and public lies:

He’s belligerent. She’s in a funk.
When he fades, the world teeters.
When she burgeons, crime blossoms.

O how the operatic impulse wavers!
Dip deep, my darling, into the blank pool.

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"How to write an old-fashioned poem to the moon -- that luminous orb so swaddled in myth, ensnared in the silvery web of its own symbolism?" Dove asks Poets.org. "Why does the moon call us? Why do we yearn to be called, to step off the hyphen?" I don't think it's an accident that the web site chose today to post the poem.

It was cool but gorgeous again on Friday. I spent the morning working on a review of "Time and Again", definitely not one of Voyager's best installments but it has its moments, plus I took a break to watch The View so I could see Russell Crowe flirting with Whoopi Goldberg (I mean, technically talking about The Water Diviner, but at this point he's repeating himself a bit because the questions are getting redundant and in some cases irrelevant to the movie). Paul worked from home and in the late afternoon we took a walk, where we saw lots of crabapple blossoms and two bunnies.

We had dinner with my parents at Ted's 355 Diner (I had a feta cheese omelet and a chocolate milkshake, which is pretty much the perfect meal, especially with home fries). Afterward we came home, watched the Elementary we missed on Thursday when Dig was on, watched most of the Bruce Jenner interview (more impressive than I was expecting -- even the Kardashians were more impressive than I was expecting, though in fairness I've never watched them before and I avoid articles about them), and watched Russell Crowe on Charlie Rose. Flowers this month at Longwood Gardens:
















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