Poem for Thursday

To the Words
By W.S. Merwin

When it happens you are not there

oh you beyond numbers
beyond recollection
passed on from breath to breath
given again
from day to day from age
to age
charged with knowledge
knowing nothing

indifferent elders
indispensable and sleepless
keepers of our names
before ever we came
to be called by them

you that were
formed to begin with
you that were cried out
you that were spoken
to begin with
to say what could not be said

ancient precious
and helpless ones

say it

September 17, 2001

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I had a mostly chore-related day...wrote a couple of articles on Shatner and more Shatner because he's most of the Star Trek news this week, took son to the orthodontist where he needed to have a new bracket glued on and then to get Deep Labyrinth, a Nintendo DS game that I expected to be easily available because I didn't realize that some of those games are rarer than others and this one would be special-order most places...after several stops at game stores, we finally found it, then I went to get a picture frame for a gift from and did a few more chores. At home the mail had arrived and I finally got my Doctor Who Complete First Series because I had a gift certificate that made it affordable and I watched the London Blitz episodes and the features and was very happy, even though I was folding four loads of laundry all the time I was watching!

My other amusement was The Octopus and Mr. Potato Head article in The Washington Post. I tried to fix my tags in my fic LJ to make them easier to navigate and then had to spend a ridiculous amount of time updating those links in the fic headers, but apparently ljArchive really does not like something I did because it won't let me download updates anymore...woe! Well, at least it was that LJ, which is kind of redundant except for the comments, and not this LJ which would really have me freaking out. I keep having to split tags here to stop them from getting too enormous. ljArchive does have a feature that lets you see which words you use the most, though, and I was somewhat horrified to discover that here as well as in my fic LJ, the number one word was "Snape." I am so disgusted with fandom on so many levels right now, and so disinterested in fic writing except as a social activity, that this embarrasses me! ljArchive also does Regressive Imagery Analysis, and while I am not entirely sure what that means, here are my top results in some areas that are interesting...

Custom Categories
Regressive Imagery Analysis for cruisedirector's journal
Compared to: Everyone

Sex		50.4%
Touch		80.0%
Odor		77.6%
Voyage		97.8%
Expressive Behavior		96.1%
Glory		88.4%

What does this mean?
 

National Memorial Arch at Valley Forge National Park.


The rear of the Washington Memorial Chapel...


...and that huge stained glass window from the inside.


This variation on a rose window is in the front of the chapel: George Washington with his own coat of arms and one representing the US. Is it wrong if I wondered whether that tree is supposed to be the apocryphal cherry tree?