Poem for Thursday

The Hug
By Thom Gunn

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

--------

That poem breaks me in different places every time I read it. Partly because I have no real desire to be twenty-two again and yet I know exactly what he means. Well, perhaps in terms of health and ease of losing weight I wouldn't mind being twenty-two...

I don't even know where today went. Kids were at a friend's house for four hours and I wish I could say that I got significant things accomplished while they were out, but I'm not entirely sure what I did, besides having a very nice lunch with . I wrote up a fairly interesting interview with Denise Crosby and tried to turn a nutty fan report on a Kate Mulgrew appearance into an article, though it wasn't easy to do without howling as the major focus of the report was Kate's response to innuendo about herself and Jeri Ryan. Somewhere I have a taped interview that could probably get me and Kate both in trouble if I ever published comments that we both agreed only after the fact were probably best left off the record...

Younger son is on a campaign to get a Nintendo DS for his birthday later this month. He has a Game Boy Advance and frankly I can't figure out what the real advantages of a DS are, other than having a stylus that I doubt he'd ever use and the ability to play a few more first-person-shooter games that I am positive he doesn't need. Are there any other parents out there with experience with both the Advance and DS who have advice in this regard? $100+ seems like a lot of money to me for a piece of equipment that seems rather redundant.

I would like to blame thank for this, which has been my family's soundtrack for the evening. It just figures that it's by the badger-badger people. Our other excitement for the evening was watching "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" which, like so many original Star Trek episodes, was even better than I remembered it. I wonder why I find "Mudd's Women" so intolerable when I like so many other episodes with elements that I should find painfully sexist, yet I can brush aside so much more easily? Even "That Which Survives" doesn't irritate me so much, since the women are programmed rather than real.


Late afternoon photo taken in the rainforest on the way to Sol Duc Resort. I love the ghostly effect of the light on the clubmoss covering the branches.


Both my children and my husband could easily have fit into this gap at the base of this enormous red cedar tree in Quinault Indian territory.


When a tree falls and other trees sink their roots into its trunk to absorb its nutrients, it is called a nurselog. Often the nurselogs eventually rot away, leaving these spectacular root formations many feet above the ground.


Here are a pair of trees of average enormity for the Hoh Rainforest, growing out of a nurselog with their roots wrapped around each other.


A slice of an enormous fallen tree in the nature center at the Olympic National Park Visitor's Center.


In close-up, you can see that this tree began life in the mid-1300s. These trees can live to be over a thousand years old if left to their own devices and in their proper environment. If this one had had a way to travel, it could have seen the first performance of Hamlet and the moon landing.


The pit inside this stump goes more than five feet down. It is at least six feet across, too.


at the foot of one of the enormous Sitka spruces. This photo was actually taken from across the street, and I still couldn't fit half the tree in the frame.