Poem for Monday

Telephoning In Mexican Sunlight
by Galway Kinnell
from Imperfect Thirst

Talking with my beloved in New York
I stood at the outdoor public telephone
in Mexican sunlight, in my purple shirt.
Someone had called it a man/woman
shirt. The phrase irked me. But then
I remembered that Rainer Maria
Rilke, who until he was seven wore
dresses and had long yellow hair,
wrote that the girl he almost was
"made her bed in his ear" and "slept him the world."
I thought, OK this shirt will clothe the other in me.
As we fell into long-distance love talk
a squeaky chittering started up all around,
and every few seconds came a sudden loud
buzzing. I half expected to find
the insulation on the telephone line
laid open under the pressure of our talk
leaking low-frequency noises.
But a few yards away a dozen hummingbirds,
gorgets going drab or blazing
according as the sun struck them,
stood on their tail rudders in a circle
around my head, transfixed
by the flower-likeness of the shirt.
And perhaps also by a flush rising into my face,
for a word -- one with a thick sound,
as if a porous vowel had sat soaking up
saliva while waiting to get spoken,
possibly the name of some flower
that hummingbirds love, perhaps
"honeysuckle" or "hollyhock"
or "phlox" -- just then shocked me
with its suddenness, and this time
apparently did burst the insulation,
letting the word sound in the open
where all could hear, for these tiny, irascible,
nectar-addicted puritans jumped back
all at once, as if the air gasped.


* * * *

Here are drawings of the Fellowship of the Ring characters as Harry Potter actors, recommended by EW on a mailing list -- hysterical!

Gacked from , based on these hilarious bad captions...

Do I even need to say Pervy Hobbit Fancier? XD
What Lord of the Rings engrish subtitle are you?
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Here is the sad but not unexpected news about Dawson's Creek's cancellation.

From my friend MaquisMom, most excellent advice on self-protection from mind-control.

And a blast from the past courtesy , so true in my case...
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first season shippiness
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