Poem for Friday

Black Eyes
By William Wetmore Story

Those black eyes I once so praised
  Now are hard and sharp and cold;
Where 's the love that through them blazed?
  Where 's the tenderness of old?
All is gone — how utterly —
  From its stem the flower has dropped.
Ah! how ugly Life can be
  After Love from it is lopped!

Do we hate each other now,
  While we call each other dear?
On that faultless mouth and brow
  To the world does change appear?
No! your smile is just as sweet,
  Just as fair your outward grace;
But I look in vain to greet
  The dear ghost behind the face.

That is gone! I look on you
  As a corpse from which has fled
All that once I loved and knew,
  All that once I thought to wed.
'T is not your fault, 't is not mine;
  Yet I still recall a dream
Of a joy almost divine —
  'T was an image in a stream.

Nothing can be sour and sharp
  As a love that has decayed —
On the loose strings of the harp
  Only discord can be made.
Cold this common friendship seems
  After love's auroral glow;
On the broken stem of dreams
  Only disappointments grow.

Do I hate you? No! Not hate?
  Hate 's a word far too intense,
Too alive, to speak a state
  Of supreme indifference.
Once, behind your eyes I thought
  Worlds of love and life to see;
Now I see behind them nought
  But a soulless vacancy.

Out and out I know you now;
  There 's no issue of your heart
Where my soul with you may go
  To a beauty all apart,
Where the world can never come.
  'T is a little narrow place —
Friendship there might find a home;
  Love would die — for want of space.

So we live! The world still says,
  "What expression in her eyes!
What sweet manners — graceful ways!"
  How it would the world surprise
If I said, "This woman's soul
  Made for love you think, but try;
Plunge therein — how clear and shoal! —
  You might drown there — so can't I?"

--------

Despite having a very early Thursday morning due to husband's very early meeting, I had a nice therapeutic day. Went to the gastroenterologist, who told me that I could eat Indian food as long as I didn't overdo it. Called my husband on the way out of the office, told him I was picking him up and took him to India Bistro. Have been told to taper off the Nexium, because sometimes if you stop taking it cold turkey you can have reflux symptoms, so I still have to take a pill every other day and then every third day and I am not supposed to have Mexican for lunch and Thai for dinner, but I can eat my favorite things in small doses and have my usual miniscule amount of alcohol on rare occasions and drink iced tea without worrying about whether it's decaf and my voice is pretty much back to normal today, so yay!

Unfortunately is in the hospital with pneumonia and I didn't get her on the phone -- hopefully she will be out by the weekend! I shall bring her eucalyptus beads (which incidentally are very helpful for sinus headaches) and maybe some smut. I still can't quite deal with the real world, so instead of reading the major news headlines I read about how mooning is now legal in Maryland (see MSNBC for details), how Jon Stewart is hosting the Oscars this year because he is whiter less irreverent than Chris Rock (again MSNBC), and all the stuff I needed to know for TrekToday, like the fact that Patrick Stewart continues to have a high opinion of himself -- maybe because he gets a request for an interview every three seconds -- no one I know won the Strange New Worlds mediocrity competition this year and the executive producers of Star Trek: New Voyages are getting divorced going their separate ways.

Hmm, that last was quite snarky. *looks at bitter fic output for the afternoon* I guess fandom is still not lighting up my life, though while ficcing this afternoon, and I had more fun with The Internet Anagram Server than may be legal and wrote something totally hot and without literary merit.

I had a nice evening watching Quest For Dragons on PBS, which is a nice mix of dinosaur and fossil history that might conceivably be connected to dragon lore and actual dragon folktales and art around the world. Younger son is obsessed with dragons so I appreciated the attempt to bring some science in, even if it was a stretch. There were some nice CGI dragons shown during the transitions and many lovely English dragons that we saw last spring, like the gargoyle-dragons on York Minster and the dragons that mark the boundary between London and Westminster by the Thames (we saw them on the boat from Greenwich at sunset, so sorry about the blur):



And after that we watched "The Changeling" so I can review it. It's really one of Shatner's finer episodes -- I find it so amusing that Kirk keeps referring to himself as Nomad's mother rather than his father, and does the "my son the doctor" routine at the end, and then there's that whole lovely long sequence where he is holding Spock while Spock recovers from the mind meld! Mmmmm! Friday I must write this up around schlepping, as younger son has the orthodontist appointment that had to be postponed when he needed stitches right near his mouth. Let us hope he has not managed to pull any brackets loose in the interim.