Poem for Tuesday

White Apples
By Donald Hall

when my father had been dead a week
I woke
with his voice in my ear
                         I sat up in bed

and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes

--------

From Billy Collins' review of Donald Hall's White Apples and the Taste of Stone in The Washington Post Book World the Sunday before last (article here). Collins calls Hall "an authority on grief" (he documented the death of his wife Jane Kenyon in his poems) and "a major figure in the canon of contemporary American poetry...in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet." The poems, says Collins, gain sincerity from "simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence" and in the poems, "as in reality, the dead outnumber the living."

I don't know where Monday went so don't ask me! I retagged some of my tags that were jumping over the point at which LJ refers them to day pages, and I wrote articles on various original series actors and Star Trek XI possibilities plus a voice actor who was on TNG and DS9, and I did lots of writing in various places so I guess my total word count for the day is probably impressive though a lot of it was scattered so it didn't seem that way! Younger son had Mad Science and older son had fencing, so the after-school-through-dinner hours were a little hectic. Took a lovely walk in the lovely weather -- even the pollen did not get to me.

At night we all watched the second half of Elizabeth I, which once again had excellent performances and Hugh Dancy looked good enough to eat...Essex told Elizabeth at one point that she looked like she was planning to eat him, and I was sort of hoping she would (oral sex doesn't count when you're a Virgin Queen, does it? *calls Bill Clinton for consultation*) I missed Jeremy Irons...so did the queen. *g* But the dialogue was so over the top, and again Elizabeth spent so much time throwing huge temper tantrums over her boyfriends in front of hundreds of people, it's a wonder any governing went on at all while she was on the throne. Sigh.


Since I posted pictures from Shakespeare's birthday party, I figured I should post a few photos of the Folger Library itself, which boasts the largest Shakespeare collection in the world. There are nine bas-relief murals on the front of the library depicting scenes from Shakespeare's plays.


This is the stained glass window in the old reading room depicting the Seven Ages of Man from As You Like It.


The bust of Shakespeare at the front of the reading room that could be seen in the fight demonstration photo yesterday is a replica of the one in Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon; there are also coats-of-arms, paintings of the Tudors and tapestries.


Puck, holding one of the Shakespeare birthday balloons here, is on one side of the building...


...and there is a garden on the other side, with statues representing scenes from Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I posted a picture of the knitted penguin that 's mother made for our younger son at : here, along with the pattern.