Sunday, May 01, 2005

Poem for Sunday


A Story About the Body
By Robert Hass


The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony,
had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost
sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work,
and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands,
looked at him directly when she made amused and considered
answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert,
they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you
would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that
I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand,
"I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around
in his belly and chest cavity -- like music -- withered very quickly,
and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't
think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines,
and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside
his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he
picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl --
she must have swept them from the corners of her studio -- was
full of dead bees.

--------

From Poet's Choice by Robert Pinsky in The Washington Post Book World, today discussing prose poems. "It seems that most first books must contain one or two prose poems, if only to demonstrate the poet's ability to manage the form, or awareness of fashion," notes Pinsky, who cites Baudelaire and Hass as examples. "The layered intelligence of Hass's prose poems is part of their charm, and their reflection of human character recalls Baudelaire," he says. Then he quotes Baudelaire -- "'Even when two lovers love passionately and are full of mutual desire, one of the two will always be cooler or less self-abandoned than the other'" -- and says, "it is almost as though Hass has meditated on Baudelaire's formulation and thought further about the negotiations and reversals of love" in the poem above, with its concluding image complicating Baudelaire's formulation "by suggesting something more intricate than the binary notion of agent and patient. The poem is unconventional in relation to some assumptions about the form: It tells a story, it is not fragmentary, it is more interested in the world than in its own language."


It rained most of the day, so we went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was twice in two days for me. My kids loved it -- in particular the whale, the yarn and the towel -- and my husband agreed that it was like Terry Gilliam taking on Dr. Who. I did realize that I should have warned people about that song, though; it's been stuck in my head for two days now and I am ready to cry or tap dance, I can't tell which. Oddly, we saw different previews in the upstairs theater in the multiplex than and I saw on Friday...to my great annoyance, we did not get Revenge of the Sith, which I forgot to mention was a highlight of my day Friday! I was thoroughly bored by Attack of the Clones and not really a fan of The Phantom Menace, slash or no slash, and having read the kids' novelization of Sith I really did not expect to be impressed, but I was utterly thrilled by the preview -- I hope the movie is half as good as it looks in that. Saturday in its place we got Batman Begins, which looked great as well, but I kept being pulled out of the moment by too many familiar faces...I wasn't seeing Batman, I was seeing Christian Bale, luscious though he is (I worry about what he's doing to his body, the extremes from The Machinist to this), and I was seeing Michael Caine and Liam Neeson and Katie "Not Getting Enough Publicity For My Films Alone" Holmes...I wonder whether I will be able to suspend disbelief during the movie.

Belated TrekToday review of "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part Two", for which I have already received hate mail! Actually that is not true, the hate mailer bypassed me and wrote directly to our news address, calling me a "terrible reviewer" because "in short, she is just so negative. Her reviews just ooze with disdain for Enterprise. Now if that's her view, that's fine, after all many Star Trek fans abandoned Enterprise...it's just unfathonable to me." (This from someone who makes sure to "check out TrekNation regulalry.") Now, here is what I don't get: how is it being a bad Star Trek fan to point out all the ways in which Enterprise betrays the Star Trek legacy? How is it being a terrible reviewer to note some of the reasons why fans abandoned Enterprise? What is the point of fighting to save a show that even its own fans acknowledge has been deemed unworthy by its core audience?

In other excitement, we picked up the van and watched bits of the Nationals game, which was ultimately rained out, though we got the unexpected pleasure of a M*A*S*H rerun while the station was killing time waiting to see if it would be called. Then, completely by accident, we caught the very end of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on ABC. I have been meaning to watch the very last scene of that movie ever since we came back from England, because after having been at Goathland Station, I wanted to see how it looked on film. I've stood where Hagrid was! Yay!







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