Monday, August 15, 2005

Poem for Monday


True Love
By Sharon Olds


In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex -- surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night,
you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.

--------

Another by Sharon Olds. I posted this one before, long ago, but it's worth repeating.


Today it was nearly 100 degrees, I had laundries, I had work, I had lots of phone calls and things to drop off various places and the kids were stir-crazy and in the middle of the afternoon we started driving to Great Falls to take a short walk, decided that it was too hot to be bearable even for a brief time outdoors by the river, so we stayed on River Road until we hit the beltway and ended up downtown at the National Museum of Natural History for a couple of hours, looking at dinosaurs and minerals in air-conditioned bliss.

Then we came home to all the insanity we had left earlier, had dinner, talked to both sets of parents (my in-laws tell me that contrary to all expectations, some groundhogs have come back! I am so hoping that Maximus is one of them!) and tried to get schedules in order for later in the week. I am wiped out, so I shall just post some trip photos from St. Michael's...


The 1909 log bottom crab dredger Old Point, now being restored at the boat yard.


The Lady Katie and the Rosie Parks at the Potomac River-Chesapeake Bay confluence.


Hooper Strait Lighthouse with Mister Jim docked in front. This yacht, built to look like an oyster buyboat, was built at Richardson's Boat Yard and named for Jim Richardson, for whom the maritime musem in Cambridge is also named.


Inside the lighthouse, an old heater and stove. Look at that waffle iron!


Blue crab caught in a trap on the waterman's wharf...


...placed below the boardwalk, where the maritime museum staff pull out crabs and eel all afternoon.


A boat from early this century being restored in the boat shop, where a wooden canoe and sailboat were also being built from scratch.

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