Poem for Tuesday

Jerimoth Hill
By Tom Chandler

812 feet, the highest point in Rhode Island

You will not recognize any bald knob of granite
or sheer cliff face silhouetted against clouds,
in fact, you won't realize you're anywhere at all
except by this bullet-riddled sign by the road
that curves through these scraggled third growth
woods that was once a grove of giant pines
that were cut down for masts that were used
to build ships to sail away to the rest of the world
from the docks of Providence Harbor, their holds
filled with wool from the sheep that grazed
in the field that had once been the giant pines
till the shepherds died off and the applers took over
and grew orchards of Cortlands and Macintosh
Delicious to fill the holds of the ships that sailed
to the rest of the world from the docks of Providence
Harbor with masts made from the giant pines till
the orchards moved west along with everything
else to less glacial land and the fields became
overgrowth of berries and hobblebush crisscrossed
by walls made of stones that had slept beneath
one inch of topsoil for twelve thousand years
till the settlers found when they tried to plant crops
that this was a country that grew only rocks which
they made into walls to pen in the sheep that provided
the wool that filled the holds of the ships that sailed
to the rest of the world from the docks of Providence Harbor.

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Got a bunch of drabbles written tonight while I was being frustrated: "Matchmaker" for , the "Snape's unwanted advisor" challenge; "Leftovers" for , the "with sauce" challenge; "Delays" for , the "late" challenge; and "Outtake", a sequel to "Combustible" for the "You want me to put that where?" challenge, by request for .

Today when my kids came home from school, they wanted to show me the Pokemon episode that ripped off Titanic, involving a ship called the S.S. Anne, and it was obvious to me that The Poseidon Adventure was a point of reference for the animators -- ship upside down, characters have to climb to the top which is really the bottom of the vessel to escape, and they used a Pokemon instead of a Christmas tree to ascend and things like that. So now I have "The Morning After" in my head (though in the credits it was called only "The Song from 'The Poseidon Adventure'" -- I guess Maureen McCormick or whoever it was had not yet had a huge hit with it when it was released), and amusing speculation on the problem of trying to do a Jesus allegory in the format of a '70s disaster movie. Really it works rather well, though I get tired of the bad girls dropping off...aren't ex-hookers supposed to be forgiven, not sent directly into the flames of perdition? But it made a nice coda to our ocean liner disaster weekend.

I'm having a shitty night online -- all sorts of old fannish bullshit has risen from the ether and is reminding me how close I came to deleting this journal a few months ago, and that the reasons for it have not gone away; I've just mostly chosen to ignore them, but there's still all sorts of crap out there, things that have been said about me that were never true, people operating under false identities and people inventing wank when they didn't have enough in their own corners...this happens too often. I am going to England in a little over a week, will have nearly two weeks without LiveJournal or any fannish crap, and when I get back I can get serious about changing my life instead of falling into the same stupid online ruts. For now I am going to go ignore. Tell me something cheerful. *g*


The Savannah Monitor lizard in the dinosaur exhibit at the Maryland Science Center.