Saturday, October 15, 2016

Poem for Saturday, Year of Hell, National Zoo Pandas

The Bear
By Robert Frost

The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall
(She's making her cross-country in the fall).
Her great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples
As she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire moth a lock of hair.
Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage
That all day fights a nervous inward rage~
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
The me-nail click and shuffle of his feet,
The telescope at one end of his beat~
And at the other end the microscope,
Two instruments of nearly equal hope,
And in conjunction giving quite a spread.
Or if he rests from scientific tread,
'Tis only to sit back and sway his head
Through ninety odd degrees of arc, it seems,
Between two metaphysical extremes.
He sits back on his fundamental butt
With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,
(lie almost looks religious but he's not),
And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,
At one extreme agreeing with one Greek~
At the other agreeing with another Greek
Which may be thought, but only so to speak.
A baggy figure, equally pathetic
When sedentary and when peripatetic.

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After getting Maddy to school, I spent the rest of the morning working on a review of Voyager's "Year of Hell" and enjoying the gorgeous weather. It was thus an uneventful day until afternoon, when on the way to pick her up we stopped at Petco for kitty litter and Michael's next door for their big fall sale.

Maddy decided to make caramel apples for dessert, though the caramel didn't stick to the apples very well (still tasted good which is all I care about but she likes them to look pretty). We watched the Blindspot we missed earlier in the week, plus some Bones. From the National Zoo on Thursday:


Bei Bei climbing down from a tree.


Like his sister, he likes to sleep in trees...


...but then he goes looking for his mother.


Sleepy Bao Bao was not in a tree.


Bei Bei climbing over Mei Xiang...


...and eating bamboo on her back.


Tian Tian rolling around.

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