Poem for Wednesday

Missing Dates
By William Empson

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

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Yeah, everyone thinks I'm wrong about something so I'm just not going to talk about anything of substance because my cat is sick again and I am stressed out and really not in the mood for arguing. Did you know that Patrick Stewart is 65 today? And Karuna Arts has purple rose fabric star skirts and tops on sale. Most importantly, iTunes has Elton John's "One More Arrow" as a single, which is very important as my vinyl copy of Too Low For Zero has vanished somewhere in our basement and we don't have that one on CD, since "I'm Still Standing" and "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues" are on the greatest hits collection. iTunes also has Jennifer Cutting's Ocean, the album I have been babbling about for the past few days that "The Sands of Time" is on -- don't take my word for it, go read The Digital Folk Life's review.

I need to do a quick grovel to , who transferred a few beloved videotapes to DVD for me awhile ago because I was terrified that something would happen to my tapes and none of them are available on commercial DVD. Tonight I had a huge craving to watch The Miracle, the movie Neil Jordan made before The Crying Game about life, jazz, art, sex and improv -- a movie that never dimishes no matter how many times it gets rewatched. It's about these two bored teenagers in an Irish seacoast town who entertain each other by making up stories about all the people they know, and a crazy summer when a circus and a mysterious woman (played by my longtime lust object Beverly D'Angelo) come to town and make them both decide to grow up.


Decorative glass set in the ceiling of the footbridge...


...from the parking lots by the train station to Tacoma's Museum of Glass on East Dock Street and the docks themselves...


...which is decorated with beautiful examples of the craft in cases over the highway.


Here you can see my reflection in the protective glass over the artwork.


The ceiling reminds me of tropical aquariums, filled with anemone and tadpole-shaped figures, jellyfish and kelp structures.

ETA: Here is a link to images of the lobby of the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Yes, it's the same artist who did all the glasswork on the footbridge: Dale Chihuly, who has an extensive description of the Tacoma bridge and its construction here (thanks, !)