Poem for Thursday

February: The Boy Breughel
By Norman Dubie

The birches stand in their beggar's row:
Each poor tree
Has had its wrists nearly
Torn from the clear sleeves of bone,
These icy trees
Are hanging by their thumbs
Under a sun
That will begin to heal them soon,
Each will climb out
Of its own blue, oval mouth;
The river groans,
Two birds call out from the woods

And a fox crosses through snow
Down a hill; then, he runs,
He has overcome something white
Beside a white bush, he shakes
It twice, and as he turns
For the woods, the blood in the snow

Looks like the red fox,
At a distance, running down the hill:
A white rabbit in his mouth killed
By the fox in snow
Is killed over and over as just
Two colors, now, on a winter hill:

Two colors! Red and white. A barber's bowl!
Two colors like the peppers
In the windows
Of the town below the hill. Smoke comes
From the chimneys. Everything is still.

Ice in the river begins to move,
And a boy in a red shirt who woke
A moment ago
Watches from his window
The street where an ox
Who's broken out of his hut
Stands in the fresh snow
Staring cross-eyed at the boy
Who smiles and looks out
Across the roof to the hill;
And the sun is reaching down
Into the woods

Where the smoky red fox still
Eats his kill. Two colors.
Just two colors!
A sunrise. The snow.

--------

You know when you're putting away your laundry, and you don't realize the cat has jumped into the laundry basket, and you go to pull out your sweater without looking, and your cat's claws get into the...you know what, never mind.

Um. So I never made it to 's today, due to a series of crises that involved someone in my household having used up all the detergent without telling me or throwing out the detergent bottle, someone different in my house having left something so disgusting on his bathroom floor that I can't even discuss it...oh, and Enterprise getting cancelled. That took up a big chunk of my writing and conversation time, though I was, at least, spared writing the article on last week's omgawful ratings that would probably get the show cancelled, since...well, the obvious.

It is amazing how much energy it takes to try to be nostalgic in one window and to rant about all the reasons this has been coming all year in another. There is a piece of me, and not a small one, that is sad in an institutional way -- no new Star Trek after 18 years is a big shift in my TV watching habits, being the one thing I ALWAYS watched, even when I swore it was so bad that I was stopping. On the one hand, I think, maybe after a rest we'll get something that's new and good. And then I look at the BSG revival (or rather I doze off during the BSG revival) and I think, maybe I don't want to think about what we might get. One thing I can say for sure: I am glad I donated my money to the Kerry campaign and tsunami relief rather than SaveEnterprise.com.

made me so happy with these Brokeback Mountain pics, but then made me wail with this article on how they're getting rid of all the actual gay sex! Because we all know that manly back-slapping and cattle herding is more important to dramatizing a gay relationship than showing gay people doing things like kissing, right, because kissing is such a cliche? Um. Right. Smallville, that bastion of bad, made me feel better, because this week it reminded me of what it's really about: superheroism as a metaphor for growing up gay!

The whole storyline involving a guy who wanted to "straighten out Smallville" by getting rid of all the sexual perverts had nice psycho-homophobe overtones, even though everyone he attacked was technically heterosexual (if Clark can ever be called technically heterosexual, even with Alicia...what they have in common is their weird perverted power, after all). And then at the end, when Chloe started talking about keeping secrets and Lois said she wouldn't confront someone over something she'd learned, where this could easily be read as coming-out metaphor and it seemed pretty obvious Lois was suspecting Chloe was going to tell her a very personal secret...that all just made me squee, in the same way Remus Lupin as Gay Werewolf makes me squee, even in nice subtle understated canon. I can watch the show for moments like this and for moments of hilarious unintended Clexy innuendo between Lex and Jason's mother.

And while I've got you caught behind a cut, Pooh Quiz. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.


Sometimes your creative solutions land you in
sticky situations but you remain adventurous
and undaunted by failure. You posess an
infectious confidence and deep thinking comes
naturally to you.
Always on the go with many paws in many pies,
Rabbits can appear slightly manic to others.
But not to worry, you have everything under
control...most of the time.

Which Pooh character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

So apparently I have succeeded in tempting my Mistress minion into sticking her toe or nipple or something into HP fandom. And she wants McGonagall fics. Of which I have a very, very small sampling of what's out there. Is there a community or archive I should know about? Not recs -- talk to me as you would talk to a complete fannish newbie about where to find fic that is in recognizable English but with no particular bias concerning characterization, era, 'ships, etc. -- just anyplace there's lots of Minerva. In gratitude, posted with permission, please feel free to link to this entry but don't repost or hotlink the illustration:


Severus Snape by . "Rough and bent," as she describes him. *g*

Lit my candles for Imbolc, spent my two minutes shuffling cards to try to clear my head. Tomorrow is my early morning. Hope everyone is having a peaceful night.