Poem for Thursday

Eminent Victorians
By Rebecca Wolff

Half a day is dead already--
a lady with a baby in the shady graveyard
promenade not quite the idea
but the first idea to be impressed
so firmly--Grace to be born

in the
bisected quadrangle
stones propped insensible
but all in relation
to the babe.

Babe what suckles
babe what grows comfortable with thieves in a fertile
bed of unsaid
slice of eponymous
grafted to the reef

Hold my hand
in the undergrowth
waist high at your leisure cheerful
child of melancholy and displeasure.
Soft in the lap you grow

hard at the breast--Oh
under- and aboveground we go
to relieve us. Camphor
and cambric by the hand not by halves,
one turn more

will take us back to where we rest.
Baby is not baby when she
wears her oblong
freshet
I will take her home to rest.

--------

As I explained earlier to , I am very boring tonight and this post will mostly consist of, "Took son to orthodontist, wrote article on Jeri Ryan, watched Troy on HBO." Cat has new medicine which hopefully will make her feel more like eating. Son had orthodontist appointment with no major revelations as no changes can be made in the braces until his upper incisors come all the way in. Kids are loving camp, which is nice because it's sports and chess (they have science and arts & crafts but the kids have not wanted to do either) and my parents seemed to feel that they needed to go to far more expensive camp for gifted children or something, but they have gone to this camp for three years now, where they play soccer half the day and get plenty of exercise and like the counselors (who are mostly University of Maryland students) and get along with the other kids without much competition, and I remember snark and bitchiness from most of my summer camp experiences and just do not see the need to subject them to four weeks of that in an increasingly short summer.

So I think I am taking a break from LJ this weekend. I don't want to read my friends list beginning midnight GMT because there is no way I am going to have The Book read over the weekend -- I have too many other things to do, both things that are obligations and things I want to do, and I don't particularly want to rush through it just so I can avoid running into "OH MY GOD ____ DIES" or even "OH MY GOD THAT THING THAT HAPPENS ON PAGE ___!" which will drive me nuts just knowing there's something specific to anticipate. And I don't want to post about how I feel before or as I read even in a purely subjective, spoiler-free sense, because I am quite tired of being told all the reasons my opinions are unfair, invalid, thick-headed, conservative, radical, misogynistic, feminist, homophobic, heterophobic, anti-Christian, anti-pagan, too literal, too subjective, too personal, too vulgar, too snobby, etc. It doesn't really bother me when the subject is political, because political debate is vital to free thought and action and I learn so much from people even when I disagree with them (unless the subject is legal reproductive choice but we've been over that ground). But when it comes to things that should be fun, diverting or entertaining? If Harry Potter matters to me because I saw a character who was a gay role model to me, and if I say it will bug me a lot of this character stops serving that function, then I don't really care if you think I am being unfair, invalid, thick-headed, conservative, radical, misogynistic, feminist, homophobic, heterophobic, anti-Christian, anti-pagan, too literal, too subjective, too personal, too vulgar, too snobby, etc.

Sigh. I am so attached to my current interpretation/rationalization of Snape and I'm sure he's about to get drastically revised. And I am insanely attached to my Lupin. I've been thinking a lot about why GOF struck me as a disappointment overall and why OOTP turned me into a serious fan, and it all comes down to those two characters -- oh, there are issues in the writing where I could pick out spots in GOF that I think are very badly edited and spots in OOTP that I think are rather brilliant, but bottom line it's never been about Harry for me. I perked up watching the first movie when Rickman swooped in and reading to my son when Lupin came on the scene, and my reading ever since has been strongly focused around them -- even my pro-Sirius bias had to do with Lupin. And his role in OOTP went beyond my expectations, and that really excited me, but I am not expecting anything similar in HBP, and while I agree that "my" Snape would not be nearly as interesting a dramatic foil for Harry as a more sinister Snape, I really enjoy the morally ambiguous line he has trod thus far and don't see how that can continue going into the end of the series. I believe it is fair to say that I am not a true Harry Potter fan, and next time I get attached to characters they should be fully my own so I can do what I want with them (I say this every single time I fall into a fandom). So there.


A massive stone on Ruby Beach that looks so much like a totem pole to me -- I can see faces in two different places!