Poem for Friday

City Gent
By Craig Raine

On my desk, a set of labels
or a synopsis of leeks,
blanched by the sun
and trailing their roots

like a watering can.
Beyond and below,
diminished by distance,
a taxi shivers at the lights:

a shining moorhen
with an orange nodule
set over the beak,
taking a passenger

under its wing.
I turn away, confront
the cuckold hatstand
at bay in the corner,

and eavesdrop (bless you!)
on a hay-fever of brakes.
My Caran d'Ache are sharp
as the tips of an iris

and the four-tier file
is spotted with rust:
a study of plaice
by a Japanese master,

ochres exquisitely bled.
Instead of office work,
I fish for complements
and sport a pencil

behind each ear,
a bit of a devil,
or trap the telephone
awkwardly under my chin

like Richard Crookback,
crying, A horse! A horse!
My kingdom for a horse!
but only to myself,

ironically: the tube
is semi-stiff with stallion whangs,
the chairman's Mercedes
has windscreen wipers

like a bird's broken tongue,
and I am perfectly happy
to see your head, quick
round the door like a dryad,

as I pretend to be Ovid
in exile, composing Tristia
and sad for the shining,
the missed, the muscular beach.

--------

Thursday was notable for the Sears Home Repair people not coming. This is because, for the past four days in a row, the dryer has worked. *still knocking all available wood* I had cancelled all my plans in the expectation that they would be coming, so I had a quiet day, which is just as well since I still have almost no voice. I wrote news bullets and an article on Star Trek Online (which won't actually be online for a year at least), finished my very last exchange fic to a point where I am satisfied if not thrilled with it, finished my very last beta for someone else's exchange and finished some very entertaining stuff of no redeeming literary value whatsoever with . How do other people have time to read everything in the various holiday communities if they're also writing? I am amazed at how many more hours in the day other people seem to have than me and want to know where I can get some!

This evening we all watched that quite dreadful second season Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?", one of the installments in Kirk's ongoing "meet god, kill him" complex (score: Kirk 5, God 0, unless you count bringing Spock back from the dead in which case it's really Kirk 6, God 0). It's entertaining for me to watch Leslie Parrish because, having experienced a religious conversion reading Richard Bach's Illusions in my early adolescence, I read all his later books when he was into freaky out-of-body, out-of-mind celestial plane traveling with her while they were married, so I know all this stuff about her that thankfully I have now mostly forgotten. She's very pretty and her character is pretty pathetic but at least she pulls it together when it counts. And, you know, nothing can kill Illusions for me, not even Bach being mostly nuts. That book laid the foundation for everything I later realized I believed in and I am not sorry.

Anyway, after Star Trek my husband went to make cookies to bring to his parents this weekend and I had to fold laundry, and since I wanted to watch something relatively short while doing so, I put on Russell Crowe's documentary about turning himself into Jim Braddock for Cinderella Man which is on the bonus features disc. It was enormously enjoyable, partly because the film (a Gruntland feature) had music from My Hand, My Heart playing in several places, partly because how hard can it be to watch a short about a bunch of hot men sweating and training, and partly because Russell is just so much fun to listen to even when he's feeling sorry for himself. No matter how much posturing he may have been doing for the cameras, it is obvious that he did a tremendous amount of work for this film, fight training and choreography and getting his body in shape and getting in workouts with the lesser-known actors playing his opponents, and I just want to bop him because even if he gets an Oscar nomination for the film (which he deserves, though I will root for Heath Ledger to win), what people are going to remember about him in 2005 is that he got arrested for throwing a telephone. That's what's making the year-end magazines, not the movie and everything that went into it. It's really frustrating being a fan of his because I can't even get many people to give his movies a chance -- maybe the tabloid stuff shouldn't count against him, but it does for them the same way I can't watch Sean Connery or Mel Gibson after they ran their mouths and said idiotic things. I can forgive the telephone the way I forgave the bar fights but sometimes it's a close thing; one day maybe I'll have that actor-character blur that will make it simply impossible for me to see Russell Crowe as anything other than Russell Crowe, and what a monumental shame that would be, because he is so extraordinarily good at what he does.


I love the way the remains of the flowers on the tulip trees act like little egg cups to catch the snow. (What kind of filter do I need to avoid color-distorting glare in the future? Polarizing? UV? Both?)