Poem for Friday

Night Games
By Susan Firer

In the early 50's shoe stores,
after you put on the new ones,
you went over to the machine
& put your feet into the mouse-
hole shaped foot holes & looked
into Flash Gordon viewer on top
of the juke-box sized machine you
were pressed against. And you could see
through the stiff leather, through
the shoes, through your socks.
It was spectacular, Superman
X-ray vision in a shoe store.
And I always wanted to rip the viewer
from its downward glance. Why
look at feet? I wanted a shortcut
to the souls of those around me.
I wanted to look into all their broken,
damaged hearts & stir the crayon soup
I imagined there, secret as the inside
of my mother's silk-lined purse,
my father's fireproof lock up.

In the fall, after dinner, new school shoes
off, the wind carried bits of fire.
I'd wing my sister's artery blue 45's through
the sparked air. "Teen Angel" whoosh. Restless,
I'd pretend blindness, limp maimed into the coming
dark, waiting for the others to finish dinner
& start the divining rod children's
night games, which were our true teachers:
statue maker, blind man's bluff, pickle,
hide `n' seek, 50 all scatter, ghosts
in the grave yard. There was a gold angel
holy water font on my bedroom wall,
right above the light switch. Barefoot
at night, before we slept, we touched
the blessed water in the Sign Of The Cross
to our foreheads, hearts, and shoulders.

In the beautiful lost troubles of childhood-
cinema dreams, in those sparky, dusty beds,
people we loved and had already
lost: war-lost uncles, cancer-lost aunts,
rocking chair dead grandmas, dead baby brothers,
and sweet pea cooking, car-killed neighbors, all
stopped by, bent over, and kissed our holy
water touched foreheads and hearts.
They came smelling like the inside of lit October,
like just blown out orange candles.
In winter red birds flew into our house
through one of the three, small, round holes cut
into the bottom of each of our houses' storm windows.
We never shut the storm windows' wooden
slats. We liked the excitement and mystery
of housed, winter-berry-red lost birds.

--------

It has been...A Day. Do me a favor and tell me that you cannot get your shit together at this time of year either. *g* I woke up early, since my husband had to get into work early, yet somehow I am even more behind than usual. In good news, I did manage to get the kids to and from everywhere they needed to be -- school, bus, violin, Hebrew school -- and I did manage to see , who provided me with excellent Middle Eastern food.

And I am getting a new computer! This is probably an insane time to do it, given how insane I am in general at this time of year and the fact that setting up everything on a new computer always takes two full days -- is there a way to migrate Outlook mail filter settings, for instance, or do I have to set those up from scratch? Must remember to download and burn Firefox and WS_FTP installers before it arrives, and get the newest Palm software and arrrrgh. I am going to get even more way behind and lose my job and all my freelance opportunities just trying to get updated enough to be able to play the media files they want me to cover!

Everyone reading this, please go over to 's journal and leave her vibes and hugs in the comments of her most recent entry, okay? She had a much, much worse day than I did. Being sick is so much worse than any work or social crap...

Another hundred words written in the car while waiting for the bus: , "Auld Lang Syne". Am wondering whether I am writing drabbles to avoid reading a novel that does not include Jack Aubrey or Stephen Maturin.

From : In order to get an idea of how my friends view me, I would like everyone to go down this list and pick the one from each pair that you think describes me the best. Then copy this and post it in your own journal to see how your friends view you.

leader or follower
quiet or talkative
spontaneous or planned
dominant or submissive
logical or intuitive
social or loner
kinky or vanilla

Heh, can't wait to see if anyone says quiet. Not to mention how the dom/sub and kinky/vanilla count comes out.


This morning when I got into the van to drive my younger son to school, there was so much frost on the windows that I had to scrape, then wait for the defroster to do something about the layer the scraper couldn't remove. And while I was waiting, I admired the frost and took some photos.


You can see the six-point crystallization pattern of water here more clearly than I've ever seen it in a snowflake.


This was shot against the blue-tinted strip at the top of the front window, hence the coloring and the specks tossed around by the scraper and windshield wipers.


Here you can see some of the tree branches beyond the car.


And again, these gorgeous patterns. Things like this can make my entire day.