Thursday, December 03, 2015

Poem for Thursday, Due Date, Kiss of the Spider Woman, South Mountain

Sinking into the Leopard Pillow
By Gillian Conoley

I threw out everything that didn’t give me a spark

and hung all the whites on the table.

Greens and deep dirt browns and grays.

The sensory titillations of the day

entered each limb’s phantom collapse and gait, tremor are you there?

See until you are gone and there is only what you are seeing.

Just trying that meant yesterday.

What to do today. Falls the shadow.

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"I was reading through one of the unlined, black-covered, artist sketchbooks I've scribbled in since I first began to write...I came upon these lines, they were all by themselves, on one page," Conoley wrote in yesterday's Poem-a-Day column. "This poem reminds me how companionable writing is, how it’s always there, if you’re patient enough." What makes the poem for me is "The Hollow Men" T.S. Eliot reference in the last line.

I believe that as I type this, it may finally have stopped raining, at least for a while! It was so dark in the morning that I had trouble removing the cats from my legs to get out of bed, and I was sleepy most of the morning, though I woke up in the afternoon while I was doing boring work because we put on Due Date, a fairy mediocre RDJ buddy road trip movie which treats female characters marginally better than I feared it might, mostly because they're absent instead of objects of leering. Some parts of it are painful but at least it's not too long.

We had dinner at California Tortilla with Angela and Kevin, then came back to our house and watched Kiss of the Spider Woman, which neither of them had ever seen and we hadn't watched in years. Despite the enormous changes in gay rights and concern about stereotypes since the movie was made, it holds up really well, especially since it's not set in the U.S. After they went home, I caught up on Nashville and tried to catch up on email. Since we never made it to the South Mountain parks this fall, here are some from last fall:














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