Poem for Christmas Day

Skating in Harlem, Christmas Day
By Cynthia Zarin

To Mary Jo Salter

Beyond the ice-bound stones and bucking trees,
past bewildered Mary, the Meer in snow,
two skating rinks and two black crooked paths

are a battered pair of reading glasses
scratched by the skater's multiplying math.
Beset, I play this game of tic-tac-toe.

Divide, subtract. Who can tell if love surpasses?
Two naughts we've learned make one astonished 0--
a hectic night of goats and compasses.

Folly tells the truth by what it's not--
one X equals a fall I'd not forgo.
Are ice and fire the integers we've got?

Skating backwards tells another story--
the risky star above the freezing town,
a way to walk on water and not drown.

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Have eaten marzipan cake and am about to go walk the dog, then later we are going to the battlefields at Gettysburg which are a mere 10 miles from Hanover (I had thought it was further). Beautiful day, bright sunlight, huge hawks circling outside the windows.

Just for fun, passed on by , this article on Return of the King that makes me howl:

"There's so much online slash fiction and photo-mashing featuring boy-on-boy pairings from The Lord of the Rings that we may need a whole new internet to hold it all. The combinations are endless: Frodo and Sam, Aragorn and Legolas, Gandalf and Pippin, Gollum and Frodo, Pippin and Merry, Peter Jackson and his...biggest fan? One thing's for sure: With all those lingering stares, tender hugs, and caressing of hands, Jackson's The Return of the King is the most gloriously gay Hollywood movie since...well, since Master and Commander."

And also from , also from CityPages:

"If fan fiction (in which, say, Kirk and Spock jump each other's bones) didn't already exist around Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin nautical adventures, this movie version from director Peter Weir would do the trick. Oh, Russell Crowe, as hale and valorous Captain Jack Aubrey, let down your hair! Oh, pale and bookish ship doctor Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany, recalling Cate Blanchett), hold your hearty commander to his honor! See the tender string duets, the spunky spats! Swoon to the fraught glances as Stephen, with Jack's able assistance, plunges the...um, scalpel into the soft, pink mouth of his wound! Alas, Jack and Stephen's maritime relationship becomes no more explicit than that; so much for historical accuracy. *snip* The battle scenes are charged and savage. In between them, the movie lags, the Aubrey/Maturin macho/femme opposition being not nearly complex enough to buoy it. Oh, for some sex! (Or is that what all the shooting is about?)"

Merry Christmas to everyone who is celebrating, a continuing happy Chanukah to those of us celebrating that, and someone let me know how Peter Pan is please...