Poem for Wednesday

Fog
By Amy Clampitt

A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands' spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
                          Tactile
definition, however, has not been
totally banished: hanging
tassel by tassel, panicled
foxtail and needlegrass,
dropseed, furred hawkweed,
and last season's rose-hips
are vested in silenced
chimes of the finest,
clearest sea-crystal.
                          Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O'Keefe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.

--------


This morning when I walked my kids to school we couldn't see twenty feet in front of us. It's fading slowly now, though not really burning off; it's chilly and gray, and for the first time I'm noticing all the yellow and red leaves in the woods behind the house. I love this weather.

The truth meme answers:

1) In eighth grade home ec class, I burned instant pudding.
True. I can't cook to save my life, though I do have an excuse for this one. Our entire class was making some kind of pastry with pudding for the filling. Every other group was given the kind of Jell-O pudding that has to be cooked. So I was watching the group next to ours, and rather than looking at the box in my hand to see the directions, I just started doing what they were doing. My teacher was very apologetic for having given us instant pudding when it started to smoke.

2) I have never finished reading Atlas Shrugged.
True. I have read Atlas Shrugged four times but I have never gotten through John Galt's speech. And I'm an unabashed Ayn Rand fan; sexual politics and social insanity aside, I think she's a really compelling writer. I'd love to know other people's strategies for staying awake during the 60+ page lecture, becuase I've always had to skip straight to the rest of the story.

3) My first 9-5 job, during the summer in high school, was as a file clerk in a law firm.
False. Though not, as guessed, because such jobs are hard to come by; there were several high school students working in that collection firm all three summers when I worked there, trudging from the sorting room to the enormous file room where we put away several hundred cases an hour. My very first job was in a travel agency, and after three straight days of doing nothing but ripping up old tickets, my hands blue and bleeding from the paper cuts and the carbon copies, I said the hell with this and ended up at the law firm.

4) In a stage production of How To Eat Like A Child, I played the bratty younger sister.
True. I'm not even 5' tall; in nearly every play I've done, I've been cast as the bratty kid or the old lady. Hence the brevity of my acting career; typecast at a young age.

5) I once won $1000 in a college essay writing contest.
True. The Rose Foundation Award for Undergraduate Research at the University of Pennsylvania. The foundation stipulated that the thesis advisor got 1/5 of the award, so I nabbed my prof $200 and she was very grateful. I bought a car stereo and my first sleep sofa with that money.

I got several reminders yesterday that people suck. (No, I don't mean Arnold, though yeah, that does suck; after this nation elected Bush, however, nothing surprises me, and by the standards for impeachment established by Republicans during the Clinton Administration it should be easy enough to get rid of him if he misbehaves.) I just mean people you thought you knew, could count on in a crisis or call friends.

And fandom (especially RPF) is insane. Though this is not news. I'm going to do my work and go back to fantasyland, where at least the characters mostly play nicely.