Poem for Sunday

Report from the Field
By Dorothea Tanning

Sublimation, a new version of piety,
Hovers the paint and gets her going.
Everything drifts, a barely heard sigh is the

Sound of wind in the next room blowing
Dust from anxiety. A favorite receptacle
Holds her breath and occasional sewing.

Only the artist will be held responsible
For something so far unsaid but true,
For having the crust to let the hysterical

Earnest of genuine feeling show through,
And watching herself in the glassy eyeing
Of Art as seen through a hole in her shoe.

Painter and poet, sometimes said to be lying,
Agonizingly know it is more like dying.

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From today's Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch in The Washington Post Book World. "At 93, Dorothea Tanning, who has had a long and marvelous life as a visual artist, is our most surprising new poet. She is an audacious dreamer, and the spirit of creativity, the sheer joy of making things, is everywhere apparent in her restless, inventive, energetic and triumphant first book of poems, A Table of Content. Tanning takes her epigraph from Montaigne -- "It's hard to be always the same person" -- and turns it every which way. She is drawn in poetry, as in painting, to radical juxtapositions, collage-like effects, and longs for multiple lives, a multiplicity of selves." Hirsch quotes one line of hers to show her sense of ecstasy -- "Wild rapture spins over your personal landscape" -- that is perfectly immediate and visceral to me. And he quotes from another poem, "Bridge, Moon, Professor, Shoes"...is it very wrong that that title makes me think instantly of Remus Lupin and the quote itself makes me think of what Dumbledore says to Snape about dreams in Prisoner of Azkaban?

Slept dreams, they say, take just a few seconds
no matter how long they are. Or how far

I walked on that bridge of spider silk
with the moon beside me like a friend.

Her light trapped us in a radiance of bliss so
pure, hours weren't hours, or minutes minutes

as we passed my old lecture hall, its professor
stopping in the middle of his question: "Can

someone here tell me -- ?" to stare at us as we
floated along, my insouciance blurring a little

with a sense of guilt. Had I a right to this?
Could such joy be mine for free?

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Name ten cancelled shows you love. Extra credit for those killed before their time. Double extra credit for shows with major queer text/subtext.

These were all killed before their time -- seemed sort of silly to call Dawson's Creek a cancelled show after its lengthy run, or La Femme Nikita even though that was cut off in its prime and then briefly revived in a very unsatisfactory manner. I didn't really love the last three on here but they deserved longer runs than they got, and maybe I would have loved them in time.

1. Star Trek
2. VR5
3. Space: 1999
4. The original Battlestar Galactica
5. Quark
6. The Tick
7. Dark Angel
8. She Spies
9. Brimstone
10. Skin

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Gacked from , for witches, a simple spell:
1. Open a new file in your PC.
2. Name it "the destructive policies of George W. Bush."
3. Drag it to the trash.
4. Empty the trash.
5. Your PC will ask you: "Do you really want to get rid of the destructive policies of George W. Bush?"
6. Answer calmly "Yes" and click the mouse button firmly.
Perhaps one could add significant ingredients to the file before deleting it, such as war footage, or Dubbya looking confused, or an asinine quote of his.


The inner harbor seen from the deck of the Cisne Branco.


Constellation dressed for her birthday.

Cuauhtemoc's beautiful masts.	Sagres flying her colors.

Mircea's figurehead.

Shall try to answer backlogged comments while out of town. GIP made from a button that was a gift from :



Have to cut back to fifteen. I only regularly use twenty -- the question is which M&C icons I absolutely need.

We're off in a little while to Hanover. I'm still not sure where we're watching fireworks tonight. It's drizzling here so hopefully that will end by evening...and cool things off a little. Happy Independence Day.