Pumpkin-Envy
By Charles Harper Webb
How many hours did I lie in bed, thought stapling
my sixteen-year-old arms to the sheets,
thought's curare, when I finally did dial Tami Jamison,
numbing my lips too much to speak?
How often did I think, "I'm dead," feeling
my strength leak away, phlegm drown my lungs,
sarcomas thrust like red toads up out of my skin
in the three days between the blood-drawing
and the doctor's benediction: "Negative."
Thought is a rope that pulls the kite out of the sky --
a cramp that locks the boxer's chin as fists hiss
toward his head. "What sharks?" my friend demands,
launching the sea-kayak that gives him so much fun.
How many odes would Keats have traded for one
night with Fanny Brawne? What did understanding do
for Nietzsche, but make him more insane?
Thought is more deadly than crack or heroin.
Its pipe to my lips, its needle in my vein,
I loll in my dark room, and envy pumpkin vines.
Whatever's in their way, they overrun. Unafraid
of blight, birds, drought, or humans' being,
they stretch out in the heat, let their roots drink deep
and -- never giving a thought to anything --
make a million copies of the sun.
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"A problem with self-deprecating comedy is that it is often a flimsy disguise for complacency," writes Robert Pinsky in Poet's Choice. "Webb is sometimes funny in his poems, which often present the author's defects, but he rises above the kind of modesty -- often described as 'wry' -- that asks to be admired. The ordinary, quotidian dread that is the subject of Webb's poem 'Pumpkin-Envy' [from his book Amplified Dog] feels real to me: a set of fears that seem barely contained by his four-line stanzas, an artful effect of those four-square units nearly overflowed altogether by uneasy questions." Pinsky feels that "the rhetorical questions about Fanny Brawne, Nietzsche, sharks and the over-the-top, hyperbolic imagery of staples, curare, red toads, heroin needles are comic and heartfelt: Their energy expresses authentic, intelligent neurosis. The way 'Unafraid' hangs pointedly above the final stanza is as expressive in its way as Gilbert's rhymes. And the effortless creativity of the pumpkins, making their 'million copies' is a fitting close for this poem that touches in its central stanza on John Keats and the subject of writing itself. An ambition to find the right words begins the poem, with that failed phone call; it is the ambition that touchingly, as well as amusingly, haunts every line."
Had a weird morning feeling like maybe I was supposed to be at con.txt but feeling so decidedly unfannish that I think it's a very good thing I wasn't, even though it's right near me. I was trying to post two Star Trek articles, and TrekToday's database was refusing to let me, and it was very frustrating even though neither of them was remotely earthshattering (Frakes to direct Ellison episode of Masters of Science Fiction, G4 successful with Star Trek 2.0), and I was thinking about all the ways in which being a professional Trekkie has killed not just Star Trek fandom but maybe all large-scale fandom for me and being kind of bummed.
Then in the afternoon, I went with
We had to get some stuff for our trip in the evening, so I went out with the
...as company for the female sea lion who has been at the zoo since the 1970s, rescued after being caught in a net that broke her jaw.
Beavers! The one in front is the mother and the other three are her children.
And again, because their big flat tails are so cute.
The hippo! ...what do you mean you can't see it?
Oh, fine, have a pygmy hippo instead! (The one above is probably the same one that's on the right in this picture!)
Part of me is bummed I am not getting more Rose episodes, and part of me thinks, yes, write her out now while things are still good. I watched so many shows for longer than I should have...am trying to decide whether I am making that mistake with Smallville now, except I have little invested there emotionally at this point so it's not like I'll be really cranky later. But shows I loved that have had a great big definitive ending? Voyager, ugh. X-Files, blaargh. La Femme Nikita, I don't want to talk about it. I have often complained about the way Fox TV left VR.5 hanging, but in a way that's the perfect ending: Sydney in VR, where anything can happen, and the possibility of picking up again days or years or decades later.
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